The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes [1st ed.] 9783030537043, 9783030537050

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The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes Edited by Elke Loeffler · Tony Bovaird

The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes ‘Loeffler and Bovaird are among the leaders of research in co-production, in both theoretical and empirical terms – and their leadership will be undiminished with this volume. They bring together major thinkers in the field to offer a collection which hits all the important markers for a handbook: it is comprehensive, clear, contemporary and coherent, but also inclusive of major strands in the literature’. —John Alford, Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia ‘This handbook is your one-stop shop for all the exciting new developments related to the co-production of public services. Its wide-ranging and trenchant essays clarify what the Handbook’s editors call the Four Co’s of co-production: co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment. The essays also investigate the why, where, when and how of co-production and probe its unrealized potential and possible pitfalls. The volume’s ultimate insight is that the concept of co-production helps us reimagine how twenty-first century citizens relate to government’. —Chris Ansell, Professor, University of Berkeley, USA ‘A handbook for both practitioners and students, this is the go-to source for expertise and research evidence on co-production. Avoiding fads and fashions, the book takes a serious look at the disciplinary roots of co-production in political science, political economy and public administration. Analysing co-production in a wide variety of public services – from audit to social care – the book provides a truly international examination of both opportunities and challenges’. —Vivien Lowndes, Professor, University of Birmingham, UK ‘Co-production is a promising perspective that is challenging public administration orthodoxy. This comprehensive handbook, organized and edited by two leading experts on co-production, is an authoritative guide to applying co-production. It provides a wide-ranging set of analytic and empirically-grounded contributions from authorities in the field, highlighting the potential of co-production, its theoretical and practical implications, and obstacles and solutions to its implementation. This handbook is sure to become an essential resource for both public professionals and citizens’. —Jim Perry, Professor, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA ‘The concept of co-production suffers from overuse and misinterpretation, lacking a shared understanding in practice and theory. It is frequently viewed as an unalloyed good, without appraisal of costs and benefits, opportunities or limitations. The analysis in this Handbook from major thinkers in the field provides an overdue and muchneeded critical lens through which to understand and reappraise co-production and will help to develop a more meaningful role for co-production in our society’. —Karl Wilding, Chief Executive, National Council of Voluntary Organisations, UK

Elke Loeffler · Tony Bovaird Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes

Editors Elke Loeffler Strathclyde Business School University of Strathclyde Glasgow, UK

Tony Bovaird INLOGOV, School of Government University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-53704-3 ISBN 978-3-030-53705-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank a number of people for their contributions to this volume. First, of course, we are very grateful to the authors of all the chapters for their hard work, their willingness to fit in with our editorial ‘nudges’ and their patience when publication demands became onerous. We very much appreciate their efforts and hope that they will feel that the finished volume makes it all worthwhile, whether as a valuable source of knowledge over the next few years or, at the very least, an impressive volume in the bookcase behind them during their video conference calls. Next, we have benefited greatly from the help of our contacts at Palgrave Macmillan, in particular Nick Barclay and Rebecca Roberts, who have been very supportive throughout the publication process. There are a number of people whose co-productive efforts over the years have been fundamental in steering the editors towards this theme, and therefore who can claim to be progenitors of this volume. They include John Alford, Dick Atkinson, Paula Brown, Karen Cheney, Julie Christie, Davinia Edafioka, Penny Halliday, Dieter Lehmann, Jon Mansell, Mike Owen, Gerry Power, Bryan Reader, Lesley Riley, Paul Slatter, Robin Surgeoner, Lucie Stephens, Jörgen Tholstrup and Martin Willis. Finally, both of us wish to acknowledge the inspirational help which we have received over the years from Gareth Symonds. However, lest there be any doubt, let us make it clear that none of these good people are responsible for any of the deficiencies in this volume, all of which should be placed squarely at the door of the editors.

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Contents

Part I 1

2

Introduction and Definitions of Co-Production

User and Community Co-production of Public Services and Outcomes—A Map of the Current State of Play Elke Loeffler and Tony Bovaird User and Community Co-production of Public Value Elke Loeffler and Tony Bovaird

3

31

Part II Disciplinary Roots of Co-production 3

Co-production in Political Science and Public Administration Jeffrey L. Brudney

4

The Political Economy Foundations of Co-production Peter M. Jackson

5

How to Work More Inclusively with ‘The People It’s About’ to Foster More Inclusive Outcomes: A Behavioural Insight and Behavioural Design Perspective on Co-production Tinna C. Nielsen

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79

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CONTENTS

Part III

Different Perspectives on Co-production

6

Co-production from a Public Service Logic Perspective Kirsty Strokosch and Stephen P. Osborne

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7

Understanding Co-production as a Social Innovation Adalbert Evers and Benjamin Ewert

133

8

The Importance of Co-production in Branding as Governance Strategy Erik-Hans Klijn and Vidar Stevens

155

Getting to Authentic Co-production: An Asset-Based Community Development Perspective on Co-production Cormac Russell

173

Law and Co-production: The Importance of Citizenship Values Anthony M. Bertelli and Silvia Cannas

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Discover Together: Attempting to Alter Understanding and Practices in Governments’ Work with Citizens Robin Phinney and Jodi Sandfort

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9

10

11

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Co-production from a Third-Sector Perspective Beth Gazley

Part IV 13

14

15

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Co-commissioning of Public Services and Outcomes

Co-commissioning at the Micro-Level: Personalised Budgets in Health and Social Care Editor Musekiwa and Catherine Needham

249

A Strategic Management Approach to Co-commissioning Public Services Edoardo Ongaro, Cristina Mititelu, and Alessandro Sancino

265

Transforming Lives, Communities and Systems? Co-production Through Participatory Budgeting Oliver Escobar

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CONTENTS

Part V

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Co-design of Public Services and Outcomes

16

Co-designing Healthcare Services with Patients Glenn Robert, Sara Donetto, and Oli Williams

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17

Co-design of Public Spaces with Local Communities Antoni Remesar

335

18

Co-designing Neighbourhood-Level Social Improvement and Innovation Jacob Torfing, Elizabeth Toft Kristjansen, and Eva Sørensen

19

It’s All in the Practice: Towards Quality Co-design Nicole Moore and Mark Evans

Part VI

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Co-delivery of Public Service and Outcomes

20

Co-delivering Public Services and Public Outcomes Elke Loeffler

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21

Co-producing Desistance? The Role of Peer Support Trish McCulloch

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Part VII

Co-assessment of Public Services and Outcomes

22

Co-assessment Through Digital Technologies Benjamin Y. Clark

23

Co-assessment Through Citizens and Service Users in Audit, Inspection and Scrutiny Dave Mckenna

Part VIII

24

429

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Implementing and Scaling Co-production in Public Service Organisations and Systems

Relational Leadership: An Analytical Lens for the Exploration of Co-production Hans Schlappa, Yassaman Imani, and Tatsuya Nishino

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CONTENTS

491

25

Skilling and Motivating Staff for Co-production Sanna Tuurnas

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Citizens’ Motivations for Co-production: Willingness, Ability and Opportunity at Play Trui Steen

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Vulnerable Citizens: Will Co-production Make a Difference? Taco Brandsen

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27

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Risk and Resilience Management in Co-production Jon Coaffee, João Porto de Albuquerque, and Vangelis Pitidis

Part IX 29

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Governance of Co-production

Can Co-production Promote Participatory Public Governance? Victor A. Pestoff

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ICT-Based Co-production: A Public Values Perspective Wouter Nieuwenhuizen and Albert Meijer

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Governance Challenges in Co-production Steven Rathgeb Smith

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Understanding, Analysing and Addressing Conflicts in Co-production Anna Scolobig and Louise Gallagher

Part X

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Future Research Agenda

33

Experimental Methods for Investigating Co-production Sinah Kang and Gregg G. Van Ryzin

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Co-production: Using Qualitative and Mixed Methods Vivian R. Ramsden, Tanya Verrall, Nicole Jacobson, and Jackie Crowe-Weisgerber

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Co-producing Research with Users and Communities Catherine Durose, Beth Perry, and Liz Richardson

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Developing Evidence-Based Co-production: A Research Agenda Tony Bovaird and Elke Loeffler

Index

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693

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Notes on Contributors

João Porto de Albuquerque is Professor and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, UK. He is a geographer and computer scientist, working in the fields of Geographic Information Science and Sustainable Development, developing transdisciplinary methods to understand cities and enable transformative knowledge co-production with stakeholders, particularly marginalised communities in the global South. His substantive expertise areas include citizen-generated data, sustainable urbanisation and disaster resilience. He has secured research grants from diverse UK and European funding bodies in collaboration with partners in countries such as Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Romania and the United States. Anthony M. Bertelli, Ph.D., J.D. is Professor of Political Science at Bocconi University, Italy, and Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Pennsylvania State University, USA, where he holds the Sherwin-Whitmore Chair of Liberal Arts. Bertelli is the Senior Executive Editor of the Journal of Public Policy. His research interests converge on the role of political institutions in shaping public policy outcomes and organisational structures. Tony Bovaird is Emeritus Professor of Public Management and Policy at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham, UK, and Chief Executive of the nonprofit organisation Governance International. His research covers strategic and performance management, evaluation of public services and governance, and user and community co-production. He has advised the UK Parliament, the Cabinet Office and other UK government departments, Scottish and Welsh Governments and many local authorities and public bodies. He has undertaken research for UK Research Councils, European Commission, OECD, UK government departments and many UK and international public bodies. He

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has served on the Editorial Boards of Public Administration Review, International Public Management Journal and International Review of Administrative Sciences. He is co-author (with Elke Loeffler) of Public Management and Governance (Routledge, 3rd edition 2016). Taco Brandsen is currently Professor of Public Administration at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Secretary-General of the European Association for Public Administration Accreditation (EAPAA); Vice-President of the EMES International Research Network; and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. His research over the past decade has primarily focused on the governance of public services, co-production and co-creation, social innovation, hybrid organisations and the third sector. Recent publications include Coproduction and Co-creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Service Delivery (with Trui Steen and Bram Verschuere) and Social Innovations in the Urban Context (with Sandro Cattacin, Adalbert Evers and Annette Zimmer). Jeffrey L. Brudney, Ph.D. is the Betty and Dan Cameron Family Distinguished Professor of Innovation in the Nonprofit Sector at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA. Dr. Brudney served as Editor-in-Chief of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly and was a member of the Expert Advisory Board on the United Nations State Of The World’s Volunteerism Report. His book, Fostering Volunteer Programs in the Public Sector: Planning, Initiating, and Managing Voluntary Activities, earned the John Grenzebach Award for Outstanding Research in Philanthropy for Education. Dr. Brudney received the Award for Distinguished Achievement and Leadership in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research, the highest award presented by the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action. Silvia Cannas is a Ph.D. student in Public Policy and Administration at Bocconi University, Italy. She earned a master’s degree in law at the Università degli Studi di Roma ‘La Sapienza’. Cannas is interested in trust dynamics in the public sector. Her dissertation investigates whether and how co-productive arrangements can increase trust in the healthcare sector. Benjamin Y. Clark is Associate Professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy and Management and Co-Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Engagement at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, USA. His research and external engagement is largely focused on local government management. His scholarship examines how technology can be used to improve city management (smart city technology) and how cities need to be planning financially and managerially for future innovations (smart cities and autonomous vehicles). Before his move into academia, he worked as a public servant at the local, federal and international levels.

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Jon Coaffee is Professor of Urban Geography based in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is a recognised international expert in urban security and resilience. His research focuses upon the interplay of physical, technical and socio-political aspects of urban vulnerability and has been co-produced with a range of private and governmental stakeholders. This work has been published in multiple disciplinary areas and most recently includes: Futureproof: How To Build Resilience In An Uncertain World Security (2019), Resilience and Planning: Planning’s Role in Countering Terrorism (2020). His work has been supported by a significant number of UK and European Research Council grants. Jackie Crowe-Weisgerber is a Métis woman, a mother of 4, a grandmother of 11 and a community member who has worked with the Research Division, Department of Academic Family Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Canada since 1999. She has co-created various aspects of a number of articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals; thus, bringing the voice of individuals/patients and underserved communities to the dialogue. Sara Donetto is a social scientist with a background in medicine. She is a lecturer at the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care at King’s College London, UK. Sara’s research interests include: critical understandings of person- and relationship-centred care; collaborative approaches—codesign and co-production in particular—to healthcare practices and systems; pedagogical innovation in healthcare professional education. Recent research includes studying the impact of patient experience data in hospitals; a collaboration with Jönköping University, Sweden studying co-production approaches in Sweden and UK; and a collaboration with Guildhall School of Music and Drama, exploring the value of performance-based pedagogies in the education of healthcare professionals. Catherine Durose is Reader in Policy Sciences at the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Local Government Studies where she undertakes research on urban governance, public policy and citizen participation. Catherine has recently co-authored a book Designing Public Policy for Co-production: Theory, Practice and Change (Policy Press). Her current research investigates coproduction and social innovation in urban governance and is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Urban Transformations Programme, Mistra Urban Futures and Horizon 2020’s Urban Europe programmes. Oliver Escobar is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh and Academic Lead on Democratic Innovation at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, UK. He is co-investigator in the projects European Smart Urban Intermediaries and Distant Voices, and a former Director of What Works. Oliver works on participatory and deliberative democracy, with a focus on political inequalities and the governance of the future. He combines research and practice to develop social and democratic innovations across various policy and community contexts. Oliver’s work has been shared in fifty

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publications and forty training courses for students and professionals across the public sector and civil society. Before academia, Oliver worked in literature, radio, retail, fishing and construction. Twitter: @OliverEscobar—more information at http://www.pol.ed.ac.uk/people/academic_staff/oliver_escobar. Mark Evans is Director of the Democracy 2025—Strengthening Democratic Practice initiative based at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, Canberra, Australia. He is also Professor of Governance at the University of Canberra and the author of Evidence Based Policymaking in the Social Sciences: Methods That Matter (Policy Press), From Turnbull to Morrison—the Trust Divide (Melbourne University Press) and 10 Ways to Save Democracy (Macmillan). He has acted as a senior policy advisor to 24 countries, the European Union, the United Nations and the World Bank on democratic governance issues and has edited the international journal Policy Studies since 2004. Adalbert Evers until 2013 professor at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen, Germany, and presently works as a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social Investment (CSI), Heidelberg University. His research and teaching in the fields of social policy and social services is focusing on the role of third sector organisations, civil society, civic engagement, social innovation and democratic governance. Recent publications in the English language include: Volunteering and Civic Action (Voluntas 30/1, 2019), Social Innovations in the Urban Context (Springer 2016), Social Policy and Citizenship. The Changing Landscape (Oxford University Press 2012), The Third Sector in Europe (Edward Elgar 2004). http://[email protected] g.de. Benjamin Ewert holds a Ph.D. in social science from the Justus-LiebigUniversity, Gießen, Germany. Currently, he works as a political and social scientist at the Department of Social Science at Siegen University. His research interests include governance issues in the realm of social, health and public policy with a special focus on state–citizen interactions and citizenship implications. Benjamin is co-editor of the book Behavioural Policies for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and has published several articles in international journals such as Public Administration, Public Policy and Administration and Policy and Politics. Louise Gallagher, Ph.D. is a sustainable development policy analyst specialised in participatory research, programme/policy planning and impact evaluation processes. Louise has worked in various roles connecting science and policy at UN Environment and WWF, among others, for over ten years. She has been affiliated with the Environmental Governance and Territorial Development hub at the Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Geneva since 2017. Her current research interests include the role knowledge co-production can play in sustainability governance. In addition, she uses this expertise to support international organisations in planning and evaluating their strategic programmes and partnerships.

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Beth Gazley is a Professor in the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University-Bloomington. She studies many aspects of inter-sectoral relations, non-profit public policy, and management. Her current work focuses on civil society resilience to climate change. She has held editorial seats on Public Administration Review, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. She is a second-career academic, with a background in fundraising and management consulting. Yassaman Imani is an experienced educationalist and researcher. Her research interests are in managing knowledge dynamics in complex organisations, leadership in private and public sector, power dynamics and strategic change. She has been involved in a number of management research projects and has successfully supervised doctoral students on related topics. She had led and further developed a researcher development programme at the university level. Yassaman has also worked with a number of organisations in the UK as an advisor, academic mentor and consultant. Peter M. Jackson is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Strategy at the University of Leicester, UK. He is Foundation Professor of Management having set up the University of Leicester’s School of Management (now Business School) in 1989. Latterly he was Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head of the College of Social Science. Peter has written extensively on topics within the fields of public sector economics and public sector management. His current research interests, in addition to co-production, include public value; public sector productivity and efficiency and the management of the public sector’s capital stock. Nicole Jacobson, B.A., M.A. is the Research Facilitator with the Research Division, Department of Academic Family Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She has a B.A. in English and German from the University of Regina, Canada and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Studies from Carleton University, Canada and leverages this background to support the Department’s qualitative research endeavours. She will be undertaking her Ph.D. in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan in the fall of 2020. Sinah Kang is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University, Newark, USA. Her research focuses on co-production of public services, crowdsourcing and open innovation in the public sector, and behavioural public administration in general. Erik-Hans Klijn is professor of Public Administration at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He published in various journals on governance networks, complex decision-making and network management and media attention and branding. Recent books: ’Branding in governance and public management’

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(Routledge, 2012 together with Jasper Eshuis), ‘Governance networks in the public sector’ (Routledge, 2016, together with Joop Koppenjan and ‘Innovations in City Governments: Structures, Networks and Leadership’ Routledge, 2017 together with Jenny M. Lewis, Lykke Margot Ricard and Tamyko Ysa). Elizabeth Toft Kristjansen is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Social Sciences and Business and an active member of the Roskilde School of Governance, Denmark. Her research interests include co-creation, collaborative governance, public leadership, institutional design and democratic renewal in the general housing sector. Elke Loeffler is Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean (Impact) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK and Non-Executive Director of the non-profit organisation Governance International, as well as Associate of INLOGOV at Birmingham University. Her research covers user and community co-production, public governance, performance and quality management. She has undertaken research for UK Research Councils, the European Commission, UNDP, OECD and many national agencies. She has led the development of the Governance International Good Practice Hub with more than 70 international case studies and co-delivered the Governance International Co-Production Star toolkit in many local and public authorities. She serves on the Editorial Boards of International Review of Administrative Sciences and Public Money and Management. She is co-editor (with Tony Bovaird) of Public Management and Governance (Routledge, 3rd edition 2016). Trish McCulloch, Ph.D. is a Reader in Social Work and Social Work Lead at the University of Dundee, UK. She joined the University in 2003, having previously worked as a social worker within youth and adult justice settings. Her research activity straddles criminal justice and professional learning and is grounded in ideas of voice, co-production and social change. Current research projects include an exploration of ‘user’ experiences of justice; a study of gender in community justice and a five-year longitudinal study of the experiences of newly qualified social workers. Trish is also Vice Chair of the Scottish Advisory Panel on Offender Rehabilitation (SAPOR) and is active in several consultancy roles. Dave Mckenna, Ph.D. is an Honorary Research Fellow at Swansea University, UK and an Associate of the Centre for Public Scrutiny, UK. He is an experienced local government researcher and practitioner with over 25 years experience of working in public services, including 10 years as manager of a local government scrutiny team. Research interests include; local government, public participation, scrutiny and collaboration. Since 2017 Dave has been working as an independent consultant helping councils and other public bodies with research, training and improvement work. His Ph.D. (undertaken at INLOGOV, University of Birmingham and awarded in 2015) examined the

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relationship between local government and public participation–he has subsequently published two articles on this theme. He is a member of the Political Studies Association. Albert Meijer is a Professor of Public Management at the Utrecht University School of Governance, The Netherlands. His research focuses on new forms of public management and governance in an information age. He has published frequently in journals such as Public Administration Review, Government Information Quarterly and the International Review of the Administrative Sciences on topics such as smart cities, transparency and public innovation. Professor Meijer is co-editor in chief of the journal Information Polity and cochair of the Permanent Study Group on e-government of the European Group for Public Administration. Cristina Mititelu is a Ph.D. researcher in the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership (CVSL) at The Open University Business School, UK. Her research interests focus on commissioning for social value and exploring the relationships between local councils, voluntary sector organisations and citizens in the process of commissioning for public services. She has published works on public management reforms, citizen participation and social responsibility in various journals, including Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences and International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing, and with a number of publishing houses. Nicole Moore is a public service executive, an Honorary Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of Canberra, Australia. Nicole was also the 2019 (inaugural) ACT Legislative Assembly Library Fellow and has held numerous public sector roles in over a decade of service. In 2013, Nicole was awarded a Public Service Excellence Award for the promotion, co-design and co-production of services with vulnerable families in the Australian Capital Territory. Her research is focused on authenticity in co-design and deliberative engagements within the public service, in particular the role that authentic engagement can play in the co-creation of public value. Editor Musekiwa is a practising specialist complex healthcare professional and a postgraduate researcher at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is an early career researcher with interest in health and social care policy, service management and user involvement. Catherine Needham is Professor of Public Policy and Public Management at the Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, UK. She has published a wide range of articles, chapters and books for academic and practitioner audiences, many of them focused on co-production. Her most recent book was published by Springer in 2018 and entitled Reimagining the Public Service Workforce.

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Tinna C. Nielsen is an anthropologist, behavioural designer and social entrepreneur applying insights from behavioural and social sciences, pioneering inclusive design approaches to foster diversity, inclusion, equality, gender parity and change in organisations, leadership, cities, policies, public services and societies worldwide. Founder of the change organisation Move the Elephant for inclusiveness, Co-Founder of the Inclusion Nudges global movement, and co-author of the Inclusion Nudges Guidebook. Strategic partner at the United Nations. Named Young Global Leader by World Economic Forum. Former positions: Global Head of Inclusion & Diversity in Arla Foods (Global Dairy Company); Danish Institute for Human Rights. Wouter Nieuwenhuizen is a graduate student of the Utrecht University School of Governance, The Netherlands focusing on research in public administration and organisational science. His main research interest is the interplay between digital technologies and governance. He is affiliated with the Data Workshop, a collaboration between local government, data scientists and organisational scholars. Digital transformation and the organisation of dashboards in organisations are among his current research projects. Tatsuya Nishino is an Associate Professor at Kanazawa University, Japan. He holds a doctoral degree of Engineering, obtained at the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokyo in 2005. Over the past 15 years, his research has focused on facility planning for senior citizens and on planning processes to reorganise public service providing facilities in cities affected by population loss. He co-edited a book on methods for reorganisation of public service providing facilities in Japan. His series of publications won him the Architectural Institute of Japan’s scholar of the year prize in 2019. Edoardo Ongaro is Professor of Public Management at The Open University, UK. His research focuses on contextual influences and adaptation of public management practices to local circumstances. Past President of EGPA. Research presentations to international universities, OECD and the European Commission. Co-editor of Public Policy and Administration. Recent books include: Public Administration in Europe: Contribution of EGPA (Palgrave, 2019, editor); Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration and Management in Europe (Palgrave, 2018, co-edited with Sandra van Thiel); Philosophy and Public Administration: An Introduction (Elgar, 2017—translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish); Strategic Management in Public Services Organizations: Concepts, Schools and Contemporary Issues (2015, Routledge, co-authored with Ewan Ferlie). He is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Fellow of the Joint University Council of Applied Social Sciences. Stephen P. Osborne is Professor of International Public Management and Director of the Centre for Service Excellence (CenSE) at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research focuses on public service reform, co-production, innovation in public services and value creation. Stephen was the Founding

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Editor and is current Editor of Public Management Review (PMR). He also edits the Critical Public Management and Non-profit Management book series with Routledge. He was the Founding President of the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM) and holds an Honorary Doctorate and Chair at Corvinus University in Budapest. Beth Perry is a Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute and Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield. Her work focuses on co-production, urban governance and the just city. She has recently co-authored two books, Reflexivity: The Essential Guide (Sage) and Cities and the Knowledge Economy: Promise, Politics and Possibility (Routledge). She is leading a large programme of work (2016–2020) on Realising Just Cities with funding from Mistra Urban Futures and the Economic and Social Research Council. She is co-editor of a forthcoming guide on co-production and transdisciplinary processes for sustainable cities published with Practical Action in 2020. Victor A. Pestoff earned his Ph.D. in political science at Stockholm University in 1977 and was appointed Professor of Political Science at Mid-Sweden University in Östersund (2002). Later he became Guest Professor at Ersta Sköndal Bräcke University College in Stockholm, Sweden and was appointed Guest Professor at the Faculty of Human Sciences, Osaka University in 2014–2017. His four most recent books are A Democratic Architecture for the Welfare State (Routledge, 2009), New Public Governance, the Third Sector and CoProduction (Routledge, 2012 & 2014), Social Enterprise and the Third Sector (Routledge, 2014) and Co-production and Public Service Management (Routledge, 2018). He is currently working on a new book on Co-production and Healthcare. Robin Phinney is the President of Rise Research, a research and evaluation firm that partners with public, private and non-profit actors on projects involving social policy, housing and homelessness and criminal justice in the United States. Previously, she was a Research and Evaluation Director at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Phinney received her Ph.D. in public policy and political science from the University of Michigan. She is the author of numerous articles and policy reports on social policy and a book Strange Bedfellows (Cambridge University Press, 2017) focusing on collaborative advocacy on behalf of low-income populations. Vangelis Pitidis is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. His research is focused on urban resilience and its potential to transform the traditional pathways of urban governance delivery, as well as in developing participatory methods for engaging local communities in disaster risk management. Vangelis has an interdisciplinary background, cutting across social sciences, urban planning, human

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geography and Geographic Information Systems. This has helped him undertake a number of different roles in many interdisciplinary international projects on building resilience and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in developing countries. Vivian R. Ramsden, R.N., BS.N., M.S., Ph.D., MCFP (Hon.) a Registered Nurse, is Professor & Director of the Research Division, Department of Academic Family Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Canada. As a participatory health researcher in primary health care settings, she is a passionate advocate of relationships, authentic engagement and transformation. Primary health care research involves strategies that identify and address locally relevant issues that impact health and wellness. Thus, in collaboration with several Indigenous communities in northern Saskatchewan and a number in South India, she is engaged in research that is co-created, co-designed, co-developed, co-presented and co-authored with the communities. Antoni Remesar is Permanent Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and Director of POLIS Research Centre and Editor of the journal On The W@terfront. He coordinates the Masters in Urban Design: Art, City, Society and is Director of the Ph.D. programme Public Space and Urban Regeneration (1999–2017). He has supervised 33 doctoral theses and been Principal Investigator of 10 competitively funded research projects on Public Art, Urban Design and Urban Regeneration. His books include Art and Participation (2019); The Art of Urban Design in Urban Regeneration (2016); Design Urbano Inclusivo (2004); Design de Espaço Público: Deslocação e Proximidade (2003); Espaço Público e Interdisciplinariedade (2001) and Urban Regeneration: A challenge for Public Art (1997). Liz Richardson is a Reader in Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research interests include: decentralised urban governance; public policy; and citizen participation. Liz conducts research in partnership with practitioners, citizens and policy-makers. Her work has appeared in journals such as Governance, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Social Science Quarterly, Social Policy and Administration, Politics and Governance, and Policy & Politics. Glenn Robert is Professor of Healthcare Quality and Innovation at King’s College London, UK. His research draws on the fields of organisational studies and organisational sociology, and incorporates the study of innovations in the organisation and delivery of health care services as well as quality improvement interventions. Current research interests include collaborating with designers to identify and test any frameworks and methods that might have value in addressing some of the challenges facing healthcare systems. Dissemination of findings arising from his research has often been via international public policy journals and those focusing specifically on the quality of health care. Glenn is the co-author of Bringing User Experience to Health Care Improvement: the Concepts, Methods and Practices of Experience-Based Design (2007).

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xxiii

Cormac Russell is Managing Director of Nurture Development and a faculty member of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute at DePaul University, USA. Cormac has worked in over 30 countries around the world to proliferate community-driven change and citizen-centred democracy. He has trained communities, agencies, NGOs and governments in ABCD and other strengths-based approaches in Kenya, Rwanda, Southern Sudan, South Africa, the UK, Ireland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia. Author of Asset-Based Community Development: Looking Back to Look Forward (2017) and Rekindling Democracy: A Professional’s Guide Working in Citizen Space (2020) and he has written and presented numerous videos, articles and blog posts on community building around the world. See the Nurture Development website for current publications and presentations: https://www.nur turedevelopment.org/abcd-resources/publications/. Alessandro Sancino is Director of Research on Citizenship & Governance and Senior Lecturer in Management at The Open University, UK. His research interests are in public leadership and collaborative governance both from an (inter)organisational and critical perspective. He is particularly interested in understanding the relationships between government and citizens and government and non-governmental organisations (including businesses, third sector and civil society organisations) through which public value is (co)created and/or (co)destructed, especially at the local (place) and digital level. He has published his works in several highly respected journals, including Public Administration Review, Public Administration, Public Management Review and Regional Studies. Jodi Sandfort is a Professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, USA. Her research and teaching focus on improving the design and implementation of social policy, particularly those serving lowincome children and their families. She is the Founder and Academic Director of the Future Services Institute, an applied research and training lab focused on public service redesign. She is the author of a book Cultivating Effective Implementation (Jossey Bass, 2015) with Stephanie Moulton, many scholarly articles, professional reports and multimedia products. Dr. Sandfort holds a Ph.D. in political science and social work from the University of Michigan and is a Fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration. For more information and publications, please see: http://www.jodisandfort.org. Hans Schlappa, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in public service management at Hertfordshire Business School, UK, where he teaches on governance, leadership and strategic management. His current research interests are strategic management in shrinking cities and the co-production of public services. Hans has extensive experience in undertaking management research in the UK and Europe, including assignments for URBACT, the Department of Work and Pensions, NCVO, local government and third sector organisations. Prior to

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his academic career, he worked as a regeneration professional for 22 years in public and third sector organisations. Anna Scolobig, Ph.D. is senior research associate and lecturer at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She has a background in social sciences and more than fifteen years work experience on disaster risk reduction and climate policy. Before Switzerland, she held research positions in Italy, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Her work aims at supporting decision-making and policy development through processes that integrate technical options and the perspectives of different stakeholders. She has conducted extensive empirical research on co-production in communities at risk of natural and technological hazards in several European countries. Her work resulted in over 120 publications, of which more than a half are peer-reviewed articles or book chapters. Steven Rathgeb Smith is the executive director of the American Political Science Association and Adjunct Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, USA. Previously, he taught at several universities including the University of Washington where he was the Nancy Bell Evans Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance and director of the Nancy Bell Evans Center for Nonprofits & Philanthropy. He is a past president of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action and formerly editor of the association’s journal, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. He is also the immediate past president of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR). Eva Sørensen, M.A., Ph.D. and Professor in Democracy and Public Administration at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark and Professor 2 at Nord University in Norway. She is co-director of The Roskilde School of Governance. Her research interests include political leadership, network governance and public innovation. She has published numerous articles and books on these topics. Her latest book Interactive Political Leadership was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Trui Steen is Professor at KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium, and Vice-Dean Research at KU Leuven Faculty of Social Sciences. Her research interests include co-production of public services, public service professionalism, local government and collaborative innovation. She is co-chair of the IIAS Study Group Co-production of Public Services and co-editor of CoProduction and Co-Creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services (New York: Routledge, 2018). She has published in various academic journals, including Public Administration, Public Administration Review, Public Management Review, American Review of Administrative Sciences, International Review of Administrative Sciences, International Journal of Public Sector Management, Local Government Studies and Voluntas.

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Vidar Stevens is a researcher at the Mulier Institute, Netherlands. He has published in various journals on collaborative innovation, place branding and the governance and prevention of sexual abuse in sport settings. Kirsty Strokosch, Ph.D. is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Service Excellence (CenSE) at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research focuses on the design, delivery and management of public services and she is particularly interested in exploring how value is created/destroyed in complex public service systems and the role of services users within these processes. Jacob Torfing, M.A., Ph.D. and Professor in Politics and Institutions at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark and Professor 2 at Nord University in Norway. He is director of The Roskilde School of Governance at Roskilde University. His research interests include public sector reforms, political leadership, collaborative innovation and cocreation. He has published several books and scores of articles on these topics. In 2020, he published Public Governance as Co-creation at Cambridge University Press with Chris Ansell from UC Berkeley. Sanna Tuurnas, Ph.D. is currently working as an assistant professor of public management at the University of Vaasa, Finland. Prior to her current job, she has been working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Public Governance Institute, University of Leuven and at the Institute of Advanced Social Research (IASR), University of Tampere. Her research focuses on professionals and professionalism in co-production and the so-called ‘collaborative society’. She has also cooperated with Finnish local governments in various research projects. Her work has been published in journals such as Public Management Review, International Review of Administrative Sciences and International Journal of Public Sector Management. Gregg G. Van Ryzin, Ph.D. is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA), Rutgers University, Newark, USA. His work applies experimental and behavioural methods to various issues in public management, including co-production, performance measurement and representative bureaucracy. He is a founding editor (with Sebastian Jilke and Kenneth Meier) of the Journal of Behavioral Public Administration and a co-editor of International Public Management Journal. He is author (with Dahlia Remler) of Research Methods in Practice (SAGE) and editor (with Oliver James and Sebastian Jilke) of Experiments in Public Management Research (Cambridge). Tanya Verrall, M.Sc., Ph.D. is the Director of Data Analytics and Research Partnerships at the Saskatchewan Health Quality Council and formerly a Research Associate with the Research Division, Department of Academic Family Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Her doctoral research involved a collaboration with a northern Quebec First Nations community to co-develop, implement and evaluate a community-based infant nutrition programme. She has extensive research and work experience in planning and

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evaluating health promotion initiatives, and has worked with a variety of population groups in both community and clinical settings. Oli Williams was awarded the NIHR CLAHRC West Dan Hill Fellowship in Health Equity, which he took up at the University of Bath. He later joined the SAPPHIRE Group at the University of Leicester as a research associate, before being awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute and moving to King’s College London. He researches health inequalities, co-production, patient and public involvement, equitable intervention, obesity stigma and the promotion of healthy lifestyles. He is an active promoter of health equity and social change and co-founder of the art collective Act With Love (AWL), who work collaboratively with artists and designers to address social justice issues: www.actwithlove.co.uk.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

3.2 4.1 4.2 5.1

Fig. 9.1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

9.2 9.3 14.1 16.1

Fig. 16.2 Fig. 17.1 Fig. 17.2 Fig. 17.3 Fig. 19.1 Fig. 19.2

The Governance International public value model (Source Adapted from Loeffler and Bovaird [2019]) The Governance International Co-production Star (Copyright @ Governance International [2013]) Conceptual model of barriers to co-production (Copyright Governance International [2018]) Initial co-production model (Source Brudney and England [1983]) Contemporary co-production model Client co-production as reaction to fixed ‘public good’ offering Optimal mix of public input and client input Inclusive co-design and behavioural change methodology designed by Tinna C. Nielsen, 2015 (copyright) Four essential elements of an asset-based community development process The Helper’s Crossroads 1.0 The Helper’s Crossroads 2.0 Core features and rationales to (co) commissioning Design Council’s Framework for Innovation, 2019 (incorporating the Double Diamond) (© Design Council 2019) Additive and transformative co-production in the healthcare sector (Williams et al. 2020) Besòs River. 1947 aerial photo with indication of the different points on which POLIS has developed participatory processes ‘The Pinya’. One of the 13 points of the remembrance spatial system in Bon Pastor Transition from ‘usual’ to participatory processes in public space co-design Agile service design Action learning in service design (Source Evans and Terrey 2016, 249)

43 49 53 67 70 89 91 106 175 178 179 272 316 329 341 345 347 372 376

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 19.3 Fig. 20.1 Fig. 22.1 Fig. 22.2 Fig. 22.3 Fig. 22.4 Fig. 22.5 Fig. 23.1 Fig. 24.1 Fig. 28.1 Fig. 29.1 Fig. 29.2 Fig. 29.3 Fig. 32.1 Fig. 32.2 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

33.1 33.2 33.3 33.4

Fig. 34.1 Fig. 35.1

Conceptual model for assessing the quality of co-design engagement with citizens A generic model of pathways to tackling social problems (Source Adapted from Loeffler and Bovaird [2019a]) Technologically-enabled co-assessment scale Air sensors deployed in and around Los Angeles, California. (Map source PurpleAir.com) % of cities in the sample with 311 systems (by type) (Source Author’s data collection) San Francisco 311 reports from 2019 Landslide report (Source https://maps.nccs.nasa.gov/apps/landslide_reporter/) The wheel of co-assessment Dimensions of relational leadership perspective in co-production Scales and work packages of the Waterproofing data project Psychological demand/decision latitude model Staff autonomy and stakeholder inclusiveness in three models of governance Source Pestoff (2020) Two kinds of co-production Source Pestoff (2019b) The Mekong Flooded Forest Landscape. WWF Cambodia 2016, produced for the LIVES project Option ‘careful stewardship of the mountains’. Map produced for the Safeland project by University of Salerno in 2016 Basic design of a randomised experiment Policy areas Types of experiment Co-production as independent variable (IV) or dependent variable (DV) Processes to determine mix of co-production research methods Design principles—the TERRAPINS heuristic. Note Adapted from Durose and Richardson 2015

379 398 430 433 440 441 443 457 485 549 564 568 573 621 625 640 645 645 647 662 676

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 8.1 Table 14.1 Table 19.1 Table 20.1 Table 24.1 Table 25.1 Table 30.1 Table 30.2 Table 32.1 Table 35.1 Table 35.2 Table 35.3

Characteristics of definitions of co-production Forms of citizen involvement in processes of brand co-production Core ideas of NPM and NPG/NPS influencing (co-)commissioning Learning tools to enhance participation Types of user and community co-delivery Applying dimensions of relational leadership to different levels of co-production Different types of co-production and communication skills Categorisation of public values Roles of digital technologies in co-production and its link with types of good governance Evaluation framework of criteria to anticipate, surface and address conflicts in co-production Characteristics of forms of knowledge Spectrum of participatory research Benefits and challenges of co-production at different stages of research

33 161 270 375 390 481 496 582 590 628 674 675 679

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List of Boxes

Box 14.1 Box 14.2 Box 14.3 Box 16.1

Box Box Box Box Box

16.2 16.3 19.1 23.1 32.1

Box 32.2

Box 32.3

Cases of place and local-based approaches to co-commissioning A case of strategic planning for co-commissioning: The Sutton Council toolkit for strategic commissioning (UK) Cases of strategic learning for co-commissioning Examples of service changes resulting from EBCD and AEBCD implementations (Locock et al. 2014, 44, as adapted from Donetto et al. 2015, 232) Examples of developing and testing complex interventions Summary of findings from CREATE (Jones et al. in press) Systematic review framework Definitions of audit, inspection and scrutiny Participatory co-decision methods explored in the case studies (in Boxes 32.2 and 32.3) Power dynamics in one participatory SBA for water–energy–food nexus risk planning in Cambodia (adapted from Bréthaut et al. 2019) Co-design of options for risk mitigation using plural rationality theory (adapted from Linnerooth-Bayer et al. 2016; Scolobig et al. 2016)

275 276 278

321 322 324 377 452 617

620

624

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PART I

Introduction and Definitions of Co-Production

CHAPTER 1

User and Community Co-production of Public Services and Outcomes—A Map of the Current State of Play Elke Loeffler and Tony Bovaird

Introduction This Handbook has been designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the field of user and community co-production of public services and publicly desired outcomes, which in recent years has become one of the most rapidly growing areas of study in public administration and policy. As the reader will note, this intention immediately indicates that the Handbook is NOT about co-production between organisations, although websites such as Wikipedia give much space to film and television ‘co-production’ by major media companies. Throughout this Handbook we will refer to such inter-organisational arrangements for joint working as ‘collaboration’ or ‘partnership’, not as ‘co-production’. We have asked all the authors to keep to this convention, so this is the general approach taken in all chapters (although here and there some hint of ‘inter-organisational’ joint working may have entered, undetected, into the discussion of ‘co-production’). We have been delighted that so many distinguished researchers in the field have contributed chapters to the Handbook and we want to express our debt and gratitude to them. In this chapter, we will set out the overall framework

E. Loeffler Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. Bovaird (B) INLOGOV, School of Government, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_1

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adopted in the Handbook and we will summarise the contributions of each chapter to the key issues and debates in the field.

Structure of the Handbook The Handbook consists of ten sections: • Introduction and definitions of co-production—containing this chapter, setting all the other chapters in context, plus Chapter 2, which discusses definitions, locates co-production within the framework of public value creation and unpacks co-production into the ‘Four Co’s’. • Disciplinary roots of co-production—containing chapters on approaches to co-production from the disciplines of political science, political economy and behavioural science. • Different perspectives on co-production—containing chapters on approaches to co-production from the perspectives of co-creation, social innovation, branding, asset-based community development, public law, behaviour change and third sector studies. • Co-commissioning public services and outcomes—containing chapters on micro-scale co-commissioning (the personalisation agenda), strategic approaches to co-commissioning and participatory budgeting. • Co-design of public services and outcomes—containing chapters on co-design of health care with patients, co-design of public spaces with local communities, co-design of neighbourhood-level social improvement and innovation and the quality of co-design. • Co-delivery of public services and outcomes—containing chapters on the range of approaches to co-delivery (with case studies) and co-production to encourage and support desistance. • Co-assessment of public services and outcomes—containing chapters on co-assessment through digital technologies, and co-assessment by citizens and service users in audit, inspection and scrutiny. • Implementing and scaling co-production in public service organisations and systems—containing chapters on leadership for co-production, skilling and motivating staff for co-production, citizens’ motivations for co-production, co-production and vulnerable citizens, and risk and resilience management in co-production. • Governance of co-production—containing chapters on governance implications of co-production: a public values perspective on ICT-based co-production, dealing with governance dilemmas in co-production, and dealing with conflicts in co-production. • Future research agenda—containing chapters on experimental methods for researching co-production, using qualitative and mixed methods in co-production research, co-producing research with service users and communities, and developing a research agenda for evidence-based co-production, building on the research recommendations from other chapters in the Handbook.

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Almost all chapters discuss both theoretical and empirical sides of the issue which they consider. Moreover, most chapters present evidence on the level and/or the results of co-production in practice. In the sections which follow, we pick out some of the most important arguments in each of the chapters and highlight some commonalities and differences of viewpoint. Where some of the arguments in a chapter are especially novel or have special significance for other chapters in the Handbook we provide rather more detail in order to flag up these aspects.

Definitions After this introductory chapter, Loeffler and Bovaird in Chapter 2 review the wide range of definitions which have emerged in the literature since the 1980s and which are evidenced in the different chapters of this Handbook. They highlight that these definitions generally have a common core, containing elements of both citizen action and citizen voice. From this analysis, they develop a definition of co-production and show how it can play a key role in creating public value by improving publicly desired outcomes, making public services more cost-effective, strengthening whole-system resilience and supporting achievement of public governance principles. They then discuss the Four Co’s model which unpacks the concept of co-production into its four modes—co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment. This in turn leads to a five-step change management model for operationalising the move to more cost-effective co-production. A key message from this chapter is that definitions depend on the purpose to which they are put, so that it is not sensible to seek to impose a single definition on the field, and that public service organisations should consider carefully which definition suits them (rather than simply taking one ‘off the shelf’).

Disciplinary Roots of Co-production In this section, there are contributions on the analysis of co-production from the standpoints of political science, economics and behavioural psychology. These analyses highlight how much sharing of theoretical models has occurred over the decades between these disciplines. This is, of course, partly because the study of co-production as a practice is located in public administration and public policy, which are intrinsically multidisciplinary areas. Nevertheless, some strong differences remain between these disciplinary approaches, so a theme which emerges clearly from this section is the continuing need for co-production to be analysed and understood from a multidisciplinary perspective. In Chapter 3, Jeff Brudney, one of the pioneers in the development of the co-production concept, provides a fascinating insight into its origins in the US literature of political science and public administration in the late 1970s and early 1980s, noting how it garnered interest and momentum through the 1980s but then declined, only to be reinvigorated by

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worldwide scholarship in the mid-2000s. He then traces how, from the mid2000s, scholars expanded the concept to a wider range of ‘regular producers’ and ‘consumer producers’ and to more phases of the service cycle, well beyond the original 1980s interest in service delivery, in a trajectory that has been far from linear—indeed, as he concludes: ‘Sometimes the wrong train can take us to the right place’. Brudney’s discussion of the Bloomington School highlights how a model which was originally economic (‘regular’ and ‘consumer’ producers, analysed through indifference curve and budget lines) evolved into a public governance model (featuring ‘multiple public and private actors, groups and organizations at different levels involved in multiple stages of the service cycle’). He reminds us that the Bloomington School of Political Economy evolved from the Ostrom’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, and from the outset was multidisciplinary. Yet orthodox economics was very slow to absorb the lessons from this rapidly growing corpus of academic work. Even when NPM sought to inject a strong dose of market economics into public administration later in the 1980s, economists neglected the economic insights already emerging from the co-production literature—as many economists working in public management and public policy subsequently continued to do. Does this mean that co-production simply cannot be accommodated within economic analysis? Peter Jackson demonstrates that this is not the case. Starting from the public economics analysis of individual and collective welfare maximisation through individual choice and public goods, he highlights how this ‘washes out’ all consideration of strategic agents, particularly active consumers. He then conceptualises collective co-production ‘as an arrangement which arises from voluntary cooperation, with individuals acting privately and voluntarily as citizens to contribute to services that have been provided collectively’— a significant departure from the standard (Samuelson/Musgrave) neoclassical welfare economics, which sharply distinguished public and private goods. Jackson suggests collective co-production is based on the norm of reciprocity—cooperating now with someone who will reciprocate in the future. However, this requires long-term relationships and relational contracts which are tacit and implicit (quite different from the tight specifications characterising most public service contracts between organisations). These conditions imply that long-run, stable collective co-production is likely to be associated with small and homogenous groups rather than large and diverse groups. Jackson creatively takes further the original diagrammatic analysis of the Bloomington School, analysing how consumers can complement public service offers with their own resources in order to create their own personalised experience and value, and, in so doing, minimise the allocative inefficiencies created by the fixed ‘public good’ nature of public services. Far from being outside the realm of economic analysis, individual and collective co-production can therefore be clearly explained using the same tools which micro-economists have

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used for over a century to pretend that consumers and producers are entirely separate. Jackson finally points out that vulnerable consumers may be less able be able to engage directly in value co-creation, so co-production has distributional consequences and could even be seen as giving ‘government a licence to dump on users whilst claiming improvements in effectiveness’. However, there is another dimension to the attack on the traditional narrow economic analysis of public service decision-making. Tinna Nielsen’s behavioural psychology approach in Chapter 5 focuses on how co-production makes people feel included, that they have a voice, are listened to, and believe their insights and perspectives matter. Differently from political science and economics, her analysis assumes the human mind does not operate in a purely ‘rational’ manner—rather, most behaviour is controlled by the unconscious, instinctive, emotional and associative part of the brain. However, those very mental shortcuts (heuristics), whereby people make judgements and decisions quickly and efficiently, also lead to cognitive biases, so that there is a large gap between explicit intentions and actual behaviour, which can partly be addressed through co-production practices. Unfortunately, these cognitive biases can also partly undermine co-production, since the diversity of perspectives, knowledge and insights which people bring into co-production is not always used, leading Nielsen to recommend active involvement of multiple stakeholders with diverse perspectives, with a ‘change maker’ as facilitator of the co-production process, empowering as many people as possible to co-design new inclusive solutions together. This aligns closely with the recommendations of Jeff Brudney in his chapter. At the same time, Nielsen acknowledges that rationality does indeed play a role—for example, it can help co-production facilitators to design ‘inclusion nudges’—non-intrusive behavioural interventions to influence the unconscious mind to act more inclusively, change perceptions, and mitigate unconscious bias and stereotypes. However, in a final challenge to the ‘rational model’ of public policy, she concludes optimistically that successful co-production may happen without conscious, willing, and effortful contributions, and ‘the people it’s about’ have something to contribute, even though they might not know it.

Different Perspectives on Co-production The next section contains a set of perspectives on co-production which derive from a range of academic standpoints. Some, such as public law, could be considered academic disciplines in themselves, some are branches of management (e.g. co-creation, branding) or social policy (social innovation, asset-based community development, behaviour change) while a final chapter takes a third sector perspective on co-production.

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A number of these chapters trace the evolution of the concept of ‘coproduction’ from its origin within the ‘political economy’ strand of public administration in the 1970s, through New Public Management (NPM) to the various public governance and public value schools which emerged in the 1990s. Each chapter has a different take on how the concept of co-production mutated subtly in its journey through these different schools of thought and also on the most appropriate school within which to embed it currently. Some strong commonalities link these chapters—particularly the emphasis we have already noted on the importance of understanding how multiple stakeholders interact and how citizens, as the least formally organised of these stakeholders, and therefore often the least obviously powerful, can nevertheless exert influence, either through their voice or their actions. Each perspective throws light on a different set of mechanisms by which citizens can make their contributions—but also different barriers to such co-production being effective. At the same time, there are distinctive differences between authors in this section on issues such as: • Should co-production be purely voluntary or can it also be made compulsory? Most authors appear to side with ‘voluntary’, although Evers and Ewert hint that often ‘the co-productive role of service users is mainly enforced through new forms of compliance’. However, the chapter by Bertelli and Cannas is distinctively different here. They discuss the concept of ‘administrative citizenship’, in which the relationship between local public administration and citizens is grounded in a set of rights and obligations that can both permit but also require citizens’ active involvement in the governance and provision of public services. • Should co-production be top-down or bottom-up? Although Strokosch and Osborne suggest that, within several public service reform narratives, coproduction is simply employed as a management tool giving power to professional staff over public service users, there is general agreement in this section that top-down approaches to co-production are not sufficient. Klijn and Stevens argue that public managers who are organising co-production for branding have to change their view of their roles from being simply top-down bureaucrats to becoming facilitators of stakeholder inclusion. (Similarly, in a later chapter, Phinney and Sandfort highlight how in their project the tireless work of core team members and external facilitators ultimately could not destabilise the top-down hierarchical structure and culture viewing the ‘citizen as consumer’, so that the project failed.) • Should co-production be ‘inside-out’ or ‘ outside-in’? In Chapter 2, Loeffler and Bovaird distinguish the co-production approach of ‘bringing the citizens into what public service organisations are already doing’ (what they call ‘inside-out’ co-production) from ‘public service organisations going out to citizens to support what citizens are doing’ (‘outside-in’

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co-production). Few chapters address this choice specifically. Russell is the main exception here—he stresses that Asset-Based Community Development should always start with helpers identifying what residents can do for themselves (‘done by’), then looking at what they can do with some outside help (‘done with’) and only finally what citizens want outside actors to do for them (‘done for’). Otherwise, in this section, this approach is mentioned only by Evers and Ewert (although it is mentioned again in a later section, where Torfing and colleagues illustrate how co-design of new and better solutions can ‘bring politics out to people’ and ‘bring people into politics’). It is interesting, that, as we write, the huge worldwide social movement through which citizens are helping to slow the spread and mitigate the effects of Covid-19 is not only receiving media attention but also being praised by governments (see https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1273950/Robert-Jen rick-three-million-volunteers-coronavirus-crisis-latest)—it may be that this will serve as a wake-up call to public service organisations across the world about the level of underused citizen capabilities (and citizens’ willingness to put these capabilities to good social use), if only public service organisations come out of their offices and hospitals to engage with citizens in making their daily lives better. • What should be the role of politicians in co-production? In this section only Chapter 8 by Klijn and Stevens refers to this, highlighting that marketing campaigns connected with co-production might interfere with the image or actions of politicians. However, chapters in subsequent sections also deal with the role of politicians. Later, Phinney and Sandfort in Chapter 11 suggest that elected politicians may experiment with the formation of new platforms and arenas enabling the co-design of policy solutions. Torfing and colleagues in Chapter 18 discuss how co-design of new and better solutions can enhance political support and build trust, at least if the politicians are responsive to the needs, wants and ideas of the population and deliver on jointly formulated solutions. Moore and Evans in Chapter 19 point out the lack of research on the role of politics in co-design, although they suggest that getting support from politicians has often been a major stumbling block, as co-design challenges how policy is currently made. However, politicians generally do not figure strongly in this Handbook. • How can we model the impacts of co-production within complex adaptive systems or a world of ‘ wicked problems ’? Most authors discuss both shortand long-term impacts of co-production and suggest that both need to be measured. Indeed, those authors who place special weight on the transformative potential of co-production tend to emphasise that its long-term impacts can be quite different from those in the short-term. However, only Evers and Ewart in Chapter 7 of this section, discussing ‘democratic experimentalism’, Gazley in Chapter 12, Coaffee and colleagues in Chapter 28 and Durose and colleagues in Chapter 35 pick

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up the point made by Loeffler and Bovaird in Chapter 2 that clarity of long-term impacts will be difficult to operationalise when we are operating in the complex knowledge domain. One theme which recurs across several sections of this Handbook makes its first appearance here—namely whether co-production can bring about fully transformative change in society and in citizens’ experiences or whether it is generally only instrumental in its effects. In this section, Strokosch and Osborne suggest that, viewed from the perspective of ‘public service logic’, with its holistic understanding of the role of co-production in public service delivery and the creation/destruction of value for public service users, co-production has the potential for transformative change. In later sections, a similar line is taken by a number of other authors. However, it is noticeable that not many examples of ‘transformation’ of outcomes are presented in these chapters—important exceptions include the case of an established co-production research network in a mental health hospital in London (Robert and colleagues), peer mentoring for desistence in the UK (McCulloch), the Waterproofing Data project for flood resilience in Brazil (Coaffee and colleagues), the Medical Co-op hospitals in Japan (Pestoff) and digital networks through which citizens can help the police solve crime (Nieuwenhuizen and Meijer). Turning to the individual chapters in this section, Kirsty Strokosch and Stephen Osborne in Chapter 6 provide a detailed and nuanced account of the evolution of the concept of co-production within four narratives of public service reform: New Public Management (NPM), Public Value (PV), New Public Service (NPS) and New Public Governance (NPG). They go on to argue for locating co-production within the Public Service Logic (PSL) framework, identifying five domains of value that can be created/destroyed through public service delivery: short-term satisfaction and mood, longerterm effects and impacts (outcomes), whole life experience, capacity creation and public value. They suggest that this more holistic conceptualisation differentiates between two intrinsic processes of participation (co-experience and co-construction), which are an inalienable part of public service delivery, and two extrinsic processes (co-production and co-design), in which the parties to public service delivery can choose whether or not to engage. They suggest four implications of PSL for co-production—first, the need for effective management of service encounters; second, the key role of relationship building between service staff and service users; third, the need for public service staff to develop skills around value creation; and finally, the need to recognise that value can be destroyed as well as created through the delivery (and co-production) of public services. In Chapter 7, Adalbert Evers and Benjamin Ewert argue there is a tension between co-production as it should be and actual co-production practice in most social service systems, where key co-production values, such as democracy, personal rights, respect and empowerment are not promoted—indeed,

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permanent economic pressure and managerialism, have largely dehumanised such systems, so co-production by service users is mainly enforced through new forms of compliance. Consequently, many traditions, routines and policy changes in social services undermine co-production’s democratic and social ambition, so that confidence in co-production becoming mainstream appears rather naïve. Nevertheless, they see co-production as indispensable to governing pluralist societies whose members demand service quality and participation, rather than accepting ‘command and control’ management which assumes their contributions are ‘free at the point of use’. (Here there is clearly overlap with the intrinsic processes which are an ‘inalienable’ element of service delivery, discussed by Strokosch and Osborne.) Finally, they argue that, if co-production is to become a powerful vehicle for democratising social services, it should be framed as a form of social innovation, interacting with politics, at the fringes of civil society and public systems, below the radar of policy makers and administrators (what Loeffler and Bovaird in Chapter 2 label as ‘outside-in’ approaches to co-production). They advocate action in localities as a key arena for co-productive innovations, with pilot programmes linking policy making at central levels and local action, in order to promote ‘democratic experimentalism’ and allow more public debates, participation and collaborative ways of interaction. In Chapter 8, Erik-Hans Klijn and Vidar Stevens consider the key role that citizens can play in co-producing and communicating effective ‘brands’, which are being used more frequently in the public sphere to change perceptions on problems, to attract actors to policy solutions and to communicate policies, products and places to a wider public—a trend which has largely been ignored by public administration scholars up to now. They argue that brands rely more on visual images acting on emotions and trying to entice people, instead of using words, argumentation and regulation—this connects to the analysis of behaviour change by Nielsen in Chapter 5. Since emotions are often seen, by practitioners as well as academics, as distorting deliberation processes, their role has been systematically downplayed, so the branding literature offers new perspectives for governance theories. Klijn and Stevens discuss three forms of co-production in branding: citizens as brand communicators (creating wordof-mouth), citizens as brand adaptors and citizens as brand initiators (where citizens create the brand together and also co-produce the brand communication strategy). They conclude with some ‘to do’ strategies for co-production with citizens in branding: first, build trust relations between citizens and the brand initiator; second, try to achieve learning processes in which new ideas are generated and third, provide active nurturing to ensure that co-production in branding emerges and is managed. In Chapter 9, Cormac Russell explores an asset-based community development (ABCD) perspective on co-production. He argues that such approaches are primarily concerned with citizenship enhancement and precipitating deeper associational life. ABCD is about people living in local places taking responsibility for each other and their local resources, growing collective efficacy

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and supporting people to move from being defined as ‘service-users’ to being valued as, treated as and feeling like independent citizens. It involves paying attention to what is in a local place (the ‘abundance’ perspective), not what outsiders think should be there or what they think is absent (the ‘scarcity’ perspective). Russell argues that ABCD demands radical humility from public service agencies and that ‘authentic’ co-production accelerates when prefaced by citizen-to-citizen co-creation and community building, growing more out of the collective agency of citizens than from organisational agency, since a professional can never know what a citizen needs until the citizen first knows what assets they have. Finally, Russell argues that, while there are certain things that cannot be done either by citizens or by professionals working alone, and which therefore lend themselves to co-production, many other things, particularly communitybuilding efforts, are best done by citizens in their own right, and on their own collective terms and so do not require co-production, or any other servicebased response. In Chapter 10, Tony Bertelli and Silvia Cannas take a very provocative public law perspective on co-production to identify and clarify the characteristics of situations or activities which, from a legal point of view, permit co-production. They argue that the legal case for this is straightforward for direct beneficiaries of co-production and reasonably clearcut also in common law systems (e.g. the US and UK)—but more difficult in other traditions. They suggest a new model of ‘administrative citizenship’ relating citizens to local public administration, grounded in a set of rights and obligations that can both permit and require citizens’ active involvement in the governance and provision of public services, on an equal footing with public managers, so that a citizen becomes entitled to co-produce, together with the public administration, the services from which (s)he and any proximate citizens benefit. Moreover, Bertelli and Cannas argue that co-production can be non-voluntary, compelled by mandatory legal provisions—in this they concur with the conclusion of Brandsen and Honingh (2016, 432) that ‘It is possible to coerce citizens to co-produce, even if doing so is counterintuitive’. Imposing compulsory co-production activity upon an administrative citizen is justified where the proximate individual’s participation in the co-production activity is essential to proper service functioning, and for the pursuit of the community’s ‘public interest’. However, they advise flexibility, since embedding co-production too strictly within a legal framework could diminish its effectiveness. They finally warn, first, that holding co-producers legally liable for externalities from co-production could undermine compliance and, second, that implementation mechanisms need to be different in each country. In Chapter 11, Robin Phinney and Jodi Sandfort address the relationship between co-production and collaborative governance, investigating how differing conceptions of citizen roles become solidified in management practices. How do public organisations move to viewing the citizen as co-equal in developing and implementing government programmes, rather than as a

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customer? What factors enable and constrain this change and what organisational change tools might help this significant shift to take place? They demonstrate these issues through a case study of a place-based initiative designed to promote citizen engagement and collaboration to alleviate poverty. Though staff conceptually were committed to engaging citizens as partners in developing and implementing policy, the tireless work by some core team members and external facilitators was ultimately not sufficient to destabilise the top-down hierarchical structure, given the absence of commitment and willingness to change on the part of senior management. Phinney and Sandfort conclude, however, that the initiative, although it ultimately failed, threw up a set of tools and resources that may help public organisations elsewhere to achieve greater engagement and citizen responsiveness. In Chapter 12, Beth Gazley explores why co-production, for all its recent popularity, has received so little attention in third sector theory or research. She argues that the non-profit sector’s innately ‘hybrid’ or ‘porous’ nature offers many opportunities for the third sector to engage in co-production. She considers the major theoretical frameworks justifying this—in particular, Salamon’s ‘three failures theory’ (offering strong parallels with Jackson’s analysis in Chapter 4) and Young’s ‘three lenses’. She suggests that giving non-profits a strong role in organising co-production can be seen as offering a more trustworthy and professionalised partner to government, assuring service quality. However, sometimes this may have the downside that a nonprofit ‘partner’ may be subject to less public scrutiny and accountability— and could undermine the ideal of bringing citizens closer to government. Moreover, government tends to attempt (and often succeeds in) co-opting third sector organisations to serve its interests rather than those of service users. Furthermore, citizen-volunteers as co-producers may do more harm than good without effective governmental controls or when lacking appropriate competences. She concludes that successful public service provision may require not three sectors but four, where the fourth sector is the fluid noninstitutionalised world of citizens, in their roles as families, households and informal communities.

Co-commissioning of Public Services and Outcomes In this section of the Handbook, there are three chapters on different aspects of co-commissioning, which cover micro-scale co-commissioning (the personalisation agenda), strategic approaches to co-commissioning and participatory budgeting. These chapters demonstrate the potential for co-commissioning— but also some of its difficulties. The move to individualised funding has occurred in several countries and has been one of the main approaches to micro-co-commissioning. In the UK it has been embedded within a wider ‘personalisation agenda’ but, as Musekiwa and Needham report, the battle to extend it to a large proportion of those eligible has been hard and slow and there is still a long way to go before it becomes standard (and

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smooth) practice. At the macro-level, Ongaro, Mititelu and Sancino situate commissioning within the broader process of ‘place-shaping’, as an ‘overarching strategic framework’ defining the community services required. They see co-commissioning as integral to strategically managed approaches to coproduction and, consequently, the role of political astuteness is fundamental, in order to lead for public value in a context where different publics can have either similar or competing values. Operating at both macro and meso levels, participatory budgeting is one way in which many governments through the world, at national and local levels, have sought to bring citizens into the commissioning process but, as Escobar highlights in Chapter 15, these efforts have often had only partial success. In Chapter 13, Editor Musekiwa and Catherine Needham explore cocommissioning at the micro-level, namely through personalised budgets in health and social care, most often for people with disabilities and age-related frailty, but also for people with chronic health conditions. Personalisation has been seen as potentially transformative, enabling previously marginalised and disempowered people to make decisions about their care, as co-commissioners, working with professionals to make care decisions. However, still only a small proportion of service users actually have personal budgets, partly because, after a decade of local government spending cuts, current service users have high levels of need and frailty, which may inhibit their scope to co-commission care. Musekiwa and Needham conclude that the dynamics of power, balancing professional and user control, operate differently between the social care and health care sectors—in practice, co-production has encountered more barriers in health than in other public services, because of the role of the medical profession as holders of expert knowledge. However, their accounts of the experiences of personal health budgetholders give reason for optimism that health professionals can learn during the co-commissioning process and become more willing to share some control. In Chapter 14, Edoardo Ongaro, Cristina Mititelu and Alessandro Sancino present a strategic management approach to co-commissioning public services. They situate commissioning within the broader process of ‘place-shaping’, as an ‘overarching strategic framework’ defining the community services required, but they agree with Loeffler and Bovaird (2019, 242) that ‘public outcomes are not only achieved through commissioned public services but also directly through co-production with service users and local communities and behaviour change on the part of citizens’. They argue that co-commissioning is integral to strategically managed approaches to co-production and the strategic plan for co-commissioning requires an open place-based platform for learning which can provide a bridge for collaborating organisations, individuals and communities wishing to learn. They therefore stress the need for organisational commissioners to adopt a strategic approach—this leaves open, of course, how commissioners, wishing their own strategies to be successful, can find ways also to influence the strategies of service users and communities.

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Finally, Oliver Escobar in Chapter 15 outlines how participatory budgeting (PB), seen as a democratic innovation where citizens participate directly in making collective decisions on public spending, has been adopted in thousands of localities around the world, exemplifying how co-production can generate public value through collaboration between professionals and citizens across communities of place, practice, identity and interest. He argues that PB, as a highly diverse form of co-production at the interface of public service reform, democratic innovation and social justice, is arguably the most widespread and shape-shifting democratic innovation of the last three decades. Its global spread has been enabled by its malleability, which allowed adaptation worldwide following disparate logics and with varied levels of impact. However, he also shows how PB has often been depoliticised, reducing its transformative potential and turning it into a ‘technical’ tool, although commissioning, with its inherent prioritisation processes, is a political process and therefore should accommodate ‘productive contestation’, as well as collaboration. Escobar concludes by inviting all interested readers to follow up his chapter by experimenting with, and learning from, democratic innovations like PB, and ends with the clarion call: ‘We need traditional institutions to be better and new institutions to be different. At stake is nothing less than setting the foundations for the governance of the future’.

Co-design of Public Services and Outcomes This section of the Handbook contains four chapters, covering co-design of health care with patients, co-design of public spaces with local communities, co-design of neighbourhood-level social improvement and innovation and the quality of co-design. The chapters locate the roots of co-design in a range of disciplines and professional practices and highlight how ‘codesign’ is regarded by many people and organisations as a key aspect of their practice, even if they do not necessarily identify their work as part of a wider ‘co-production’ approach—indeed, as Robert and colleagues point out, ‘co-design’ is sometimes seen as a quite separate approach from co-production. Nevertheless, these four chapters demonstrate that co-design is already a thriving activity in many parts of the public domain. However, full evaluations are available for only a few of these exercises—the chapter by Robert and colleagues is especially enlightening on what has been evaluated already and what remains to be covered. Two themes recur in several of these chapters—one is the need for creativity in co-design, as it essentially presupposes that what is currently being done is inappropriate or insufficient. Torfing and colleagues suggest that ‘swarm creativity’ is key to new solutions bringing better quality, while Remesar’s methodology for citizen engagement in public art and other placebased ‘remembrance’ projects involves creative procedures for training and preparing citizen participants. Moreover, Robert and colleagues argue for the appropriate use of creative and ideational methods—and complain that the healthcare metrics often used in project evaluation can hinder this.

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Second, all the chapters in this section (and particular the chapter by Moore and Evans) refer to the role of politics and politicians—in strong contrast to much of the rest of the book, where, as highlighted earlier, politicians get relatively few mentions. While it is to be expected that sections on co-delivery and implementation of co-production, which both happen out of the ‘line of sight’ of most politicians, might not significantly feature them, it is rather surprising that they do not feature more, at the very least in the sections on co-commissioning and the governance of co-production. Turning to the individual chapters, in Chapter 16 Glenn Robert, Sara Donetto and Oli Williams explore the origins and evolution of co-design practices within design thinking. Building on the holistic perspective of service design, and methods from a wide range of disciplines (e.g. ethnography, information science and interaction design), Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) focuses on both the lived experiences of patients, carers and healthcare staff and also the process of patients, carers and staff working together to codesign improvements, and has now been implemented internationally. They characterise contemporary EBCD projects as largely small-scale changes to existing services, relatively easy to observe and typically measured through narrow metrics. Evaluations have been positive but there remains the need for rigorous evaluation of clinical and service outcomes of EBCD, as well as cost-effectiveness. In contrast, transformative co-production, although still rare, could lead to more significant public service reform but remains relatively unstudied. Finally, they suggest that seeing co-design as simply a subcategory of coproduction obscures the relevance of the additive-transformative distinction to co-design work but that the Four Co’s conceptualisation of co-production (Loeffler and Bovaird 2016) allows for consideration of the potential impact of approaches like EBCD on the democratisation of design. They finish by acknowledging the unhelpfulness of the phenomenon of ‘cobiquity’ (a conflation of the various ‘co’ words associated with participatory design) but strongly advocate ‘recognising in equal measure the unique – and importantly radical - features and potential of both co-design and co-production’. In Chapter 17, Antoni Remesar outlines how the POLIS Research Centre has worked in Barcelona neighbourhoods for over 20 years, developing an interdisciplinary approach to public participation in urban regeneration through urban design and public art. He emphasises the importance of creativity in devising and implementing strategies for citizen participation, in conformity with the affirmation in the Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights of citizens’ right to participation in public decisions on matters that concern them. Remesar shows how his team worked in two social innovation projects with ‘organised neighbours’ and the local administration, harnessing citizen participation in workshops, civic forums, exhibitions, talks, demonstrations, walks, etc., starting from a key neighbourhood issue identified by residents themselves.

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He warns that co-production can be sabotaged both by conflicts (e.g. with local authority projects) and by delaying tactics or changes of mind by key organisational actors—a reflection that aligns with the discussion of co-production in a complex adaptive system in Chapter 36. He concludes by highlighting that co-production may not work properly where there is a fundamental asymmetry of power between actors and agents. Moreover, codesign often has to be complemented by co-commissioning and co-delivery, if frustrations and negative reactions by citizens are to be avoided. In Chapter 18, Jacob Torfing, Elizabeth Toft Kristjansen and Eva Sorensen present a theoretical framework which draws a conceptual distinction between the ‘co-production’ of more or less predefined public services and the ‘cocreation’ of more or less innovative public value outcomes, both within public organisations but also at the neighbourhood level, where it is initiated and orchestrated by social entrepreneurs and civil society organisations. However, they suggest that research investigating co-creation in local neighbourhoods remains in its infancy. They therefore examine how political leaders in both public and non-profit sectors may enhance input and output legitimacy by involving local citizens in co-creation of solutions that promote local well-being. They illustrate how co-design of new and better solutions can enhance ‘input legitimacy’ by helping to ‘bring politics out to people’ and ‘bringing people into politics’, while also enhancing political support and building trust, at least if the politicians are responsive to the needs, wants and ideas of the population and deliver on jointly formulated solutions. Further, ‘output legitimacy’ is increased where the new solutions exhibit better quality and effectively solve current problems as a result of ‘swarm creativity’. Their case study highlights a platform which enhances the political leadership in the community and also promotes new forms of participatory and deliberative democracy in order to build trust and create joint ownership of innovative solutions. Finally, Nicole Moore and Mark Evans argue that low quality or tokenistic co-design can ultimately generate citizen cynicism and undermine public trust. They highlight six principles of engagement, as an evidence-based model for assessing the quality and impact of co-production processes. However, they suggest that in practice there is still little shared understanding, particularly in government, of how best to work with citizens to change decision-making and implementation. Specifically, they highlight lack of political support as a major stumbling block, together with the ‘rational problem solving’ of the policy elite, largely made up of ‘econocrats’ or legally trained people (echoing Nielsen’s analysis in Chapter 5). They suggest inviting politicians onto project governance boards (or even becoming project participants), developing models to demonstrate potential savings, developing politically salient measures of success and using narratives and storytelling to demonstrate the public value of co-design.

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More generally, Moore and Evans point to lack of effective communication about good quality co-design practice between disciplines and sectors, limiting opportunities for shared learning and effective development of theory and practice. Nevertheless, they conclude that design thinking provides a unique opportunity for a community of practice in citizen-centric governance, so co-design develops not only better policymaking but also political literacy, confidence and ambition in the citizenry, and is therefore a key measure of the quality of democratic life.

Co-delivery of Public Services and Outcomes The co-delivery section of the Handbook contains a chapter on co-delivery, presenting a framework of co-delivery approaches and a series of case studies (Elke Loeffler) and a further chapter on co-production as an approach to encourage and support desistance (Trish McCulloch). The key message from this section of the Handbook is that ‘citizen action’ is an important component of co-production, although many authors give more prominence to ‘citizen voice’ (in terms of co-commissioning, co-design and co-assessment). In Chapter 20, Elke Loeffler presents a framework of co-delivery approaches and a series of case studies. The typology in her framework distinguishes six approaches to co-delivery—co-implementation of projects, comanagement of public facilities, contributing to peer support, co-influencing behaviour change, taking joint action to improve public services, and taking joint action to improve outcomes. Loeffler’s round-up of the range of codelivery approaches around the world in Chapter 20 shows an extraordinary variety and many of these approaches are already replicated in many other contexts. She concludes—using recent experiences of Covid-19 as an example but also making the point more generally—that citizens have resources, assets, strengths and capabilities relevant to making a significant difference to the outcomes achieved in modern societies. Moreover, they are often very willing to use these capabilities for positive social and public purposes, including the co-delivery of public services. However, the public service system in most countries is generally still not designed, organised, incentivised or experienced in making use of the rich potential of citizen contributions to co-delivery. In Chapter 21, Trish McCulloch explores a key aspect of co-delivery, the role of peer support in co-production of desistance. She argues that the place of co-production in criminal justice systems can appear particularly problematic, since in neoliberal cultures of control offenders are usually seen simply as objects upon which justice is done. However, desistance from crime can be seen as a potential trajectory for an offender, through interpersonal and social relationships, including co-production relationships with professionals. The desistance approach focuses on strengths and goals rather than risks and needs, and privileges relationships over treatment, extending beyond

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the traditional worker–client relationship to enabling and repairing relationships with family, peers, employers, communities, civic society and state, so that co-production is central. McCulloch distinguishes peer mentoring, mutual aid and self-help groups (including social cooperatives) and user-led communities/organisations as three broad and overlapping modes of peer support which each involve, at least potentially, co-productive activities. She argues that peer support can disrupt and transform existing social and public service systems and relationships. She concludes (‘with optimism and caution’) that there is particular value in user-led, group and collective forms of coproduction of desistance, reflecting a critical questioning of the reliance within public services and systems (and research) on traditional levers for change, which are rarely transformative.

Co-assessment of Public Services and Outcomes The public administration and public management literature of the past four decades has been characterised by frequent calls for evaluation of public policy. It is therefore not surprising that many of the authors in this Handbook strongly advocate the assessment of different aspects of co-production (its level, its process, the composition of its participants, its outputs, its outcomes, its conformance to governance principles, etc.) Moreover, many of them suggest co-assessment through the joint activity of public service organisations and citizens, whether service users or members of the community. Few authors give much detail on how this can be done (with the partial exceptions of Chapters 34 and 35). However, the two chapters in this section explicitly explore co-assessment—in Chapter 22, Ben Clark’s analysis focuses mainly on co-assessment through digital technologies, while Dave Mckenna in Chapter 23 mainly explores how audit, inspection and scrutiny by councillors and citizens can improve the quality of local governance and strengthen democracy. Clark’s analysis demonstrates the power of collective co-assessment through digital media by people who are contributing quite separately, indeed largely without awareness of each other, and doing so with relatively little effort— what might be styled ‘co-assessment from the cloud’. Even those citizens in Clark’s category ‘more active’ generally only require to make a small and quick input. McKenna, on the other hand, is largely analysing co-assessment procedures focused on individual contributions which are personal and usually important to the citizen concerned—indeed, they sometimes require considerable effort (even courage), given that the service user or community member may place themselves in the spotlight through their contribution. Both Clark and Mckenna agree that public services, as well as citizens, need to interpret and act upon the information gathered in co-assessment exercises—as Clark says: ‘Data alone does not make for better decision making or change behaviours – and the crowd, left to its own devices, can produce both good and bad results’, so the technology needs to be guided and harnessed for

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public purposes. Mckenna highlights that, while assessment is nominally done ‘in the public interest’, in practice the primary line of accountability for public service organisations is to political and organisational leaders, while for citizens and service users it is to their community organisations, their fellow citizens or themselves, so these different lines of accountability may pose a barrier to effective joint working and results which are valuable for both parties. In Chapter 22, Ben Clark highlights that the level of involvement by citizens in ICT-enabled co-assessment varies—his case studies range from ‘lessactive’ to ‘moderately active’ to ‘more active’ co-assessment. Even at the less active end of the scale, however, some commitment is required from participants to share time, effort, computing power, and information with the co-production electronic platform. Clark suggests that advanced ICTenabled co-production can focus more on collective assessments by the crowd, compared to the more traditional co-assessment approaches which focus on the individual. Small pieces of information from a large number of people allow governments to map problems over a wider area and longer time period than before. Moreover, ICT can create online co-production communities that support public services. Clark concludes that co-assessment through technological means has tremendous potential to shape society and provide better services and that future technological advances are likely to enable new and different kinds of co-production that we cannot even imagine today. In Chapter 23, Dave Mckenna distinguishes co-assessment from the many examples of citizen engagement in audit, inspection and scrutiny of public services, which tend to be top-down consultation, and argues that these functions need more of the radical collaboration which characterises co-production. He constructs a ‘wheel of co-assessment’, showing how coassessment might be applied through five stages of co-focussing, co-directing, co-detecting, co-judging and co-effecting. He distinguishes three main types of benefits that co-assessment might potentially achieve: instrumental (helping co-assessors to achieve their aims better), democratising (promoting openness, representation of the public interest, ensuring the voice of consumers is heard, helping citizens to understand better how government works, fostering legitimacy and trust in government) and relational (encouraging greater civicmindedness and social capital in the citizenry and helping professionals to work more responsively, constructively and accountably). In each stage, citizens need support to ensure the technical quality of their inputs while not overburdening them or losing their ‘voluntary and spontaneous’ participation. His discussion highlights the problem that benefits of co-assessment (even when done digitally), often accrue to the public service organisations involved, rather than the citizens personally.

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Implementing and Scaling Co-production in Public Service Organisations and Systems This section of the Handbook contains five chapters on different aspects of the management of co-production—leadership for co-production, skilling and motivating staff for co-production, promoting citizens’ motivations for coproduction, ensuring that co-production makes a difference for vulnerable citizens, and using co-production to develop equitable resilience outcomes in high-risk contexts. Key themes which emerge from this section include: • getting in place the necessary skills for co-production—skills are emphasised by most authors in this Handbook but they differ on what skills are most important. In an earlier section, staff skills were emphasised by Strokosch and Osborne (to understand and facilitate value creation). Here, other staff skills are also highlighted—by Schlappa and colleagues (skilled negotiators, influencers, ‘navigators’), by Tuurnas (segmenting, communication and enabling skills, plus skills in using ICT, new systems and databases) and by Brandsen (skills in supporting vulnerable people). Citizen skills, on the other hand, are emphasised by Steen (knowledge about the service at hand, having expertise in the field, having a clear understanding of and being able to process substantive information about the public service concerned, social skills) and by Brandsen (peer support skills for vulnerable people), as they were earlier by Moore and Evans in the co-design section (political literacy). On the citizen side, the authors of these chapters make little distinction between skills needed by service users as co-producers and those needed by other members of the community who are helping to co-produce—nor those skills needed by politicians to promote co-production. This would seem an area which deserves further research; • managing complex and multilayered relationships (Schlappa and colleagues), which requires an individualized and differentiated approach to co-production for different people and groups, rather than a single, standardised process (Brandsen); • recognising the need for reciprocal relationships (Schlappa and colleagues), with the associated requirement that training for staff should focus on interactive skills in complex situations of dispersed power, often crossing boundaries of professional and non-professional expertise where roles have to be constantly negotiated (Tuurnas); • appreciating the powerful effects of empathy in relationships with service users and citizens, requiring understanding of the entirety of a person’s life beyond their direct problems (Turnas; Schlappa and colleages); • understanding that leadership and power dynamics in co-production have to be negotiated and are emergent, given their inherent uncertainty and fluidity (Schlappa and colleagues);

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• understanding that the traditional power relationship between researcher and researched should be more equitable in co-production, with each recognising the contribution of the other—in practice this also is a negotiated, and fluid process, balancing a range of concerns and compromises (Coaffee and colleagues)—also see the final section of the Handbook; • seeing learning by doing as crucial in co-production, through experiments with different approaches to co-production and through networking with each other, acting as ‘critical friends’ (Tuurnas; Coaffee and colleagues); • recognising the negative effects of fear—staff fear of losing their jobs (Tuurnas) and citizens’ fear that a move to co-production and resilience may simply mask government’s reneging on difficult responsibilities by delegating them to other stakeholders (Coaffee and colleagues); • needing public strategies to make co-production easier and to provide incentives (Steen); • assuring the democratic quality of service provision and protecting public values such as citizen empowerment, inclusion, equity and equal access to service delivery—ensuring fair inputs and fair distribution of benefits (Steen) and recognising that vulnerable and marginalised people will need particular support (Brandsen)—(connecting to governance of co-production in next section); • recognising community interests as key motivators for citizens, including civic duty, a feeling of being responsible for the well-being of others, a sense of satisfaction from contributing to a worthwhile cause and doing something for the community (Steen), (connecting to Jackson’s discussion of citizen ‘preferences’ in Chapter 4); • deciding whether governments should use sanctions to encourage reluctant co-producers, given that many authors explicitly define co-production as requiring voluntary activity by citizens (Steen); • organising so that policymakers and professionals go out to meet citizens , not just the other way round (Brandsen), echoing the call in Chapter 2 for ‘outside-in’ co-production; • recognising that transformative change is possible through the coproduction of resilience (Coaffee and colleagues) … • … but accepting it is a fantasy that everyone can be mobilised in coproduction (Brandsen). Turning to the individual chapters in this section, in Chapter 24, Hans Schlappa, Yasmin Imani and Tatsuya Nishino ask ‘who is in the lead?’ during co-production. They argue that public leadership research has largely remained grounded in hierarchical and heroic leadership perspectives but that a relational leadership perspective is more pertinent, in which leadership is increasingly recognised as a social, collective and relational phenomenon, with no individual or group in full control, given that public service contexts are characterised by complex and reciprocal relationships between managers, professionals and service users. They suggest that power is not static but

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negotiated, dynamic and emergent, shifting between professional and citizen co-producers according to their expertise, knowledge, resources and position. They then develop a model which integrates relational leadership variables with individual, group and societal levels of co-production and the coproduction cycle (co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery, co-assessment). The examples they give of the operation of the ‘Four Co’s’ demonstrate that the question of ‘who is in the lead?’ is answered differently in each ‘Co’ and in different services. Finally, they suggest that relational leadership requires professionals to be skilled negotiators, able to influence formal and positional power and to build relationships through ‘shared goals, trust and empathy’, as well as navigating through environments with dispersed power configurations. This leads neatly to a discussion in Chapter 25 by Sanna Tuurnas on skilling and motivating staff for co-production. She highlights that co-production is not necessarily easy for staff, who may fear losing power over decisions, or even their jobs, or may simply lack understanding or experience of what is involved in co-production. Of course, public service personnel are a very heterogeneous group and work at various levels. Frontline staff often are more in touch with the operational reality of co-production, while senior managers and commissioners may often look at co-production more through a ‘systems’ than a ‘people’ lens. Again, the attitude to co-production may differ between staff working in public, private or third sector organisations. Successful coproduction may require crossing and transforming boundaries—allowing, and indeed even inviting, citizens to enter the traditional professional domains of public service workers can be a fundamental change in the identity of these staff. Tuurnas makes three specific hands-on suggestions for training staff in how to be successful as co-producer—first, interaction training, then understanding and demonstrating empathy and, thirdly, learning by doing , as learning occurs through co-production experiments. Turning to motivations of citizens to co-produce, in Chapter 26 Trui Steen argues that government strategies and incentives may be needed, especially to overcome inequalities, but this requires understanding of citizens’ specific motivations. Ensuring fair inputs in co-production and fair distribution of benefits is key to assuring the democratic quality of service provision, protecting public values such as citizen empowerment, inclusion, equity and equal access to service delivery. Steen also suggests that low self-efficacy may lead to inequitable effects through self-selection, holding people back from participating or selection biases on the part of public services. She warns of the ‘Matthew effect’ (‘the rich get richer, the poor get poorer’), also discussed by Taco Brandsen in Chapter 27, if co-production by vulnerable citizens is not encouraged. She also argues that social capital can either constrain or indeed support citizens’ engagement in co-production. Finally, she explores whether coercive sanctions encourage citizens to act and are ‘fair’, since everyone is expected

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to contribute, or, on the contrary, discourage co-production by demoralising people, crowding-out intrinsic motivation and cooperation and causing perverse or opportunistic behaviour. In Chapter 27, Taco Brandsen picks up a concern expressed by many other authors in the Handbook—namely, will co-production lead to a greater inclusion of vulnerable people? He highlights that for decades government attempts at engaging citizens in participation have consistently been biased against vulnerable and marginalised people, favouring those already well-represented in traditional democratic institutions. He admits that, empirically, we still know fairly little about how coproduction actually affects vulnerable people. However, extrapolating from traditional types of participation, he is cautiously optimistic, in that he finds co-production could indeed make a difference, lowering the threshold for participation, particularly where it takes an individualised and differentiated approach for different people and groups. He suggests that policymakers and professionals should preferably go out to meet citizens, not the other way round, echoing the call by Loeffler and Bovaird in Chapter 2 for ‘outsidein’ co-production. Moreover, digital communication tools could help some people to co-produce who are less mobile, although they are not for everyone (and digitalisation could indeed leave some vulnerable people worse off). Finally, he warns against the fantasy that everyone can be mobilised and suggests we should think of co-production not as a single approach, but as a family of methods. In Chapter 28, Jon Coaffee, Joao Porto De Albuquerque and Vangelis Pitidis propose resilience as an approach to managing complexity, in which co-production is a key process. They see co-production as about developing equitable resilience outcomes through a process of shared dialogue between different stakeholders, including local communities. However, they warn that government resilience policy and practice can fail to ensure protection of the population during crisis, delegating this to other stakeholders (a suggestion later reiterated by Steve Smith in Chapter 31, especially where resilient co-production systems have been undermined by austerity). Coaffee and colleagues argue that it is therefore important to ensure that marginalised voices are incorporated in decision-making and the construction of resilient futures. Their Brazilian water management case study shows the potential for transformative change in how flood resilience is viewed and operationalised, partly facilitated through a co-produced research process. However, resilience implementation generally conflicts with bureaucratic values such as efficiency and procedural rationality, which are difficult to balance with adaptability, redundancy and innovation. They stress that, although the term ‘co-production’ implies a degree of equality in research development, in practice this is a negotiated and fluid process, balancing concerns and compromises, but with the researchers remaining independent and promoting mutual learning, so the traditional

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power relationship between researcher and researched is more equitable, recognising each other’s contributions.

Governance of Co-production This section contains chapters on governance implications of co-production, including a public values perspective on ICT-based co-production, dealing with governance dilemmas in co-production, and dealing with conflicts in co-production. As set out in Chapter 2, there is a set of governance principles which we might expect to be applied to co-production and which co-production might, in turn, help to achieve. In practice, only some of these principles have featured strongly in this Handbook—particularly the equality agenda and fairness/due process. Significantly less attention had been paid to other principles, such as sustainability, transparency and accountability. It is therefore useful that, in this section, Pestoff explores accountability in his case study of the democratic model of healthcare in Japan, where he discusses principles (applied to hospital boards) of ‘one member one vote’, pluralism, representation of different interests and accountability to members. In this way he attempts to answer the challenge set by Gazley in Chapter 12. This discussion is clearly deserving of more attention. In purely hierarchical governance systems, accountability is essentially top-down; on the other hand, in purely citizen-control contexts we might expect accountability to be essentially bottom-up. However, in public governance contexts, accountability should surely be two-way and this certainly applies to co-production—citizens can hold staff accountable for their part of the co-production bargain and, similarly, staff can discuss how well citizens are playing their part. This can even be formalised in co-production charters (Loeffler 2021), developed and agreed in co-production by both citizens and public service organisations. Turning to the individual chapters in this section, Victor A. Pestoff in Chapter 29 argues that a participatory administration model should focus on empowering the lower echelons of service providers and their service users, decentralising much of the decision-making to them—this aligns with similar concerns treated in some detail in other sections in the chapters by Nielsen, Evers and Ewart, Musekiwa and Catherine Needham and Steen. Pestoff suggests that this should improve the staff’s work environment, work satisfaction and collaboration with partners, service users and other citizens. Following Ostrom, Pestoff differentiates ‘transformative co-production’, where citizens play an active role in producing public goods and services, from ‘instrumental co-production’ where they are passive service recipients, or their activities are limited to more mundane, sporadic acts contributing to the service delivery process. His findings from a recent staff study in Japanese healthcare, show that different governance models have different impacts on the work environment, work satisfaction and service quality—staff with greater autonomy were more satisfied than those with less autonomy, and this, in turn,

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can impact on perceived service quality. He concludes that governance models, rather than ownership of the service provider per se, need closer attention in research on co-production, work environment and service quality in healthcare and other publicly financed services. In Chapter 30, Wouter Nieuwenhuizen and Albert Meijer take a Public Values perspective on ICT-based co-production, complementing other chapters on ICT approaches to co-production in this Handbook. They suggest that the rise of digital technologies has reinvigorated the promise of co-production to increase legitimacy, efficiency and effectiveness both in instrumental ways, e.g. by facilitating information-sharing practices but also in transformative ways, e.g. by ‘co-creation through imagination’ using augmented reality— linking to the debate on transformational co-production raised elsewhere in the Handbook. Nieuwenhuizen and Meijer argue that the impact of ICT-based coproduction on public values is often neglected, especially the values of ‘proper governance’, concerned with lawfulness, equality and integrity. They analyse the promises and risks posed by digital technologies for ‘proper’, ‘performing’ and ‘responsive’ governance and warn that ‘proper’ and ‘responsive’ governance are at significant risk from transformative and substitutive ICT-based co-production, which bring high risks to values such as lawfulness, equality and participation. They conclude, however, that all forms of ICT-based coproduction are likely to support ‘performing governance’ (although their study does not include effects upon privacy or the dangers of ‘surveillance capitalism’). In Chapter 31, Steven Rathgeb Smith highlights how co-production programmes present complicated governance dilemmas, including the ‘dark side’ and dysfunctional implications of co-production, with daunting challenges related to equitable and ongoing citizen and user participation, programme design, appropriate accountability processes and sustainability. In order to rise to these challenges, and achieve the promise held out by coproduction, the leadership and staff of co-production programmes need to be well-versed in the complexities of forging collaborative networks among individuals with quite diverse backgrounds and expectations. Moreover, adequate resources are a critical success factor in the development and sustainability of such programmes. Smith argues that prolonged public sector austerity in many countries and the subsequent Covid-19 pandemic crisis have underscored the fragility of co-production programmes, where there is an insufficient safety net support for community members. In Chapter 32, Anna Scolobig and Louise Gallagher explicitly address conflicts in co-production, a topic which crops up in several other chapters, particularly the chapters by Remesar, Coaffee and colleagues and Durose and colleagues. The chapter focuses on conflicts in decision co-production, which they define as analytical-deliberative procedures for professionals and citizens to make better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better public decision outcomes (following Bovaird and Loeffler

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2012). Knowledge co-production processes face difficult trade-offs across social, institutional, economic and ecological value dimensions at multiple scales and some outcomes may be zero-sum (good for one group, but in equal measure bad for another), as well as being difficult to predict in advance. Carefully designed inclusive processes must therefore respect stakeholder value heterogeneity and explicitly address trade-offs and uncertainty. They suggest that co-production is well-suited to problems where consensus is low, uncertainty high and where joint action is needed—it should enable clarification of what conflicts are really about, not necessarily eliminating them but perhaps promoting necessary compromises. They focus on how different methodologies (plural rationality, multi-criteria and scenario-based) can support this. Social media can help, allowing gathering of data on attitudes, views and behaviours. However, co-production is not a ‘magic bullet’ to solve all conflicts—it can even make some worse—and it can slow down decision-making.

Future Research Agenda This section contains chapters on different aspects of the research agenda around co-production—the use of experimental methods, qualitative and mixed methods in co-production research, co-producing research with service users and communities and developing a research agenda for evidence-based co-production, building on the suggestions for further research made in the other chapters of this Handbook. Key themes which emerge from this section include: • experimental methods in research are a relatively recent development in public administration but they are especially well-suited to probing causal relationships in co-production (Kang and van Ryzin); • the most common types of experiment in co-production have been field experiments and survey experiments, focusing mainly on ‘awareness’ of co-production and ‘willingness’ to co-produce, rather than actual coproduction behaviours (Kang and van Ryzin); • co-production requires authentic engagement, necessitating new and equitable relationships between researchers and individuals/patients/endusers and communities (Ramsden and colleagues), especially in qualitative research; • many research problems need expertise beyond the academy—there is growing awareness of how complexity/‘messiness’/wicked problems necessitate interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (Durose and colleagues); • co-production is distinctive in valuing different forms of expertise and recognising knowledge produced through joint action, respecting the voice of all co-producing stakeholders (Durose and colleagues; Ramsden and colleagues);

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• co-producing research represents a shift in knowledge production towards research that is heterogeneous, problem-centred, applied, works across traditional boundaries and epistemic communities and with an explicit commitment to change (Durose and colleagues); • co-producing research isn’t about devaluing science, but re-evaluating other ways of knowing (but consequently facing contest from within the academy) (Durose and colleagues); • co-producing research raises questions about voice (whose voice matters?), actions (whose actions matter?) and values (what is the purpose of research?) (Durose and colleagues); • co-produced research is part of a more open and democratic process of knowledge production which opens up the possibility of transformation through shared action (Durose and colleagues)—this links to seeing co-production as being about both citizen voice and citizen action (Chapter 2); • when co-producing research, individuals/patients/end-users and communities need to be involved in all aspects of the research process (Ramsden and colleagues); • while co-production offers a distinctive take on methodology, it does not prescribe particular methods (Durose and colleagues); • co-produced research always takes time, patience, energy and commitment (Ramsden and colleagues); • building capacity in the co-producers of research is key, defined as strengthening people’s ability to determine their own values and priorities and to organise themselves to act on them (Ramsden and colleagues); • co-producing research often raises questions on which researchers are not accustomed to be scrutinised, including distinctive ethical challenges, e.g. on anonymity, confidentiality and intellectual property rights. Researchers therefore must remain reflexive about their own research practice and ethics, as well as recognising that the blurring of boundaries between personal commitments and organisational and professional expectations can be emotionally turbulent and demanding (Durose and colleagues). Turning to the individual chapters in this section, in Chapter 33, Sinah Kang and Gregg van Ryzin highlight that there remain important causal questions about the causes and effects of co-production, which experimental research is especially suited to answer. The use of experimental methods to study coproduction has, however, been a relatively recent trend. Survey experiments have been most common, with large, representative samples but they tend to be artificial and have limited ‘treatment’ options—and tend to test ‘willingness’ to co-produce rather than actual co-production behaviours. Field experiments, also widely used, more often examine actual participation in co-production and have the advantage of involving naturalistic interventions, real-world settings and unobtrusive measures of behaviour. Although not so methodologically rigorous, they often provide the most relevant experimental evidence for public

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policy and practice (such as a change in laws or rules, enhanced access to information, or programme rollouts on a selective basis). Kang and van Ryzin identify, surprisingly, that many field experiments have not involved the use of ‘unobtrusive’ outcome measures (recorded for other purposes) but rather selfreported (survey-based) perceptual or behavioural outcomes. They highlight that experimental research on co-production has focused so far on a rather narrow range of issues, which represent only a narrow slice of the public goods and services in which co-production occurs. In Chapter 34, Vivian Ramsden, Tanya Verrall, Nicole Jacobson and Jackie Crowe-Weisgerber explore the use of qualitative and mixed methods to research co-production. Given its focus on the interaction between professionals and individuals/patients/end-users and communities as ‘experts in their own circumstances’, co-production requires authentic engagement—and this in turn necessitates researchers developing new and equitable relationships with individuals/patients/end-users and communities, who need to be involved in all aspects of the research process. They point out that, worldwide, there are now many terms describing such collaborative research approaches, including co-production, authentic engagement, community-partnered participatory research, participatory research, participatory health research, action research, community-based participatory research and co-design. They highlight that primary health care, as defined by the WHO, should be universally accessible to all through their full participation (‘co-production’) and how the framework in the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2018) was specifically developed for research projects involving First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples (indigenous peoples) and their communities, so they can shape and co-produce all research that affects them. They suggest that guiding values in co-produced research need to be initially negotiated and then maintained, including respect for self and others; building trust in relationships; responsibility and accountability of the individuals/patients/end-users and communities; freedom of the individual; kindness and compassion; patience; humility; transparency and inclusiveness. In Chapter 35, Catherine Durose, Beth Perry and Liz Richardson highlight the need to value the contribution of non-professional researchers, recognising that many research problems need expertise beyond the academy, since complexity/‘messiness’/‘wicked problems’ necessitate interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. Research co-production is a more open and democratic process of knowledge production, enabling transformation through shared action, and ensuring relevance, so universities can demonstrate a greater societal contribution. Durose, Perry and Richardson describe how, in their own research, they have used design thinking to develop a set of principles, leading to the TERRAPINS heuristic—Transparent, Engaged, Respect, Relational, Assetbased, Positive-sum, Iterative, Not (decided in advance), Self-aware, as a

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starting point for the practical design of co-produced research. They highlight methods such as participatory action research, deliberative methods and visual or creative methods as helping to engage those least accustomed to research processes and to disrupt entrenched power dynamics. Although its value remains contested within the academy, co-producing research isn’t about devaluing science, but re-evaluating other ways of knowing and wider skills. Researchers must remain reflexive about the ethics of their own practices and accept the blurring of boundaries between personal commitments and organisational and professional expectations, which can be emotionally turbulent and demanding. Finally, in Chapter 36 Loeffler and Bovaird discuss how a more evidencebased approach might be taken to co-production. They suggest that a number of characteristics of co-production make it particularly challenging for academic research, including its tendency to be holistic, contextual, multifaceted, bridge-building, creative, dynamic, complex, emergent, behaviourinfluencing and tacitly understood. Taken together, these characteristics mean that future research strategies to investigate co-production will need to be rather different from those of the past thirty years. The chapter then summarises key research recommendations from each chapter of the Handbook. This leads to a discussion of how co-production might be evaluated, focusing on assessing not only its impacts on quality-of-life outcomes and public governance principles but also on the whole circular causal chain from inputs to those outcomes and the effect of these outcomes on citizen capabilities. Finally, the chapter explores how this research agenda might be furthered by a more creative approach, incorporating action research and the tapping of tacit knowledge.

References Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2012). From Engagement to Co-production: The Contribution of Users and Communities to Outcomes and Public Value. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 23(4), 1119–1138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-012-9309-6. Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2016). Distinguishing Different Types of Coproduction: A Conceptual Analysis Based on the Classical Definitions. Public Administration Review, 76(3), 427–435. Canadian Institutes of Health Research. (2018). Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. Ottawa, ON: Government of Canada. Loeffler, E. (2021). Co-production of Public Services and Outcomes. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Loeffler, E., & Bovaird, T. (2016). User and Community Co-production of Public Services: What Does the Evidence Tell Us? International Journal of Public Administration, 39(13), 1006–1019. Loeffler, E., & Bovaird, T. (2019). Assessing the Impact of Co-production on Pathways to Outcomes in Public Services: The Case of Policing and Criminal Justice. International Public Management Journal, 23(1): 205–223.

CHAPTER 2

User and Community Co-production of Public Value Elke Loeffler and Tony Bovaird

Introduction In this chapter, we survey the definitions of co-production which are used by authors in this Handbook, before outlining our own definition and a conceptual model which situates user and community co-production of public services and outcomes within the overall framework of public value. This leads on to the ‘Four Co’s’ model, a conceptual framework which has provided part of the structure for this Handbook. From the outset, it will be important to clarify what we do NOT mean by the term ‘co-production’. Our interests are specifically confined to ‘user and community co-production’, rather than co-production by collaborating organisations (e.g. a joint production by Hollywood film companies or international television producers, which is one of the first meanings of the term flagged up in Wikipedia). We view the terms ‘inter-organisational collaboration’ and ‘partnership working’ as being perfectly adequate to capture this inter-organisational concept, so there is no need to call it ‘co-production’. Furthermore, we believe it is valuable to reserve the term ‘co-production’ for activities which involve service users and communities, since it is rather artificial to call these activities ‘partnerships’, as they are often informal

E. Loeffler Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. Bovaird (B) INLOGOV, School of Government, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_2

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and sometimes only involve collaboration in the short-term. So, henceforth, we will use the term ‘co-production’ to mean ‘user and community co-production’. Again, the rather innocent sentence in the first paragraph above indicates that our interest is in co-production of public services and outcomes (more precisely, publicly desired outcomes). One of the most unfortunate aspects of the New Public Management (NPM) from the 1980s onwards was the tendency to focus on the public sector as simply the commissioner and provider of public services. Yet publicly desired outcomes are often achieved by activities of the public sector which cannot sensibly be called services, e.g. reducing inequality in society. Since most public outcomes require significant contributions of citizens, our interest in co-production extends to how it affects outcomes, as well as simply public services. We will discuss the meaning of publicly desired outcomes later in this chapter and show how they fit within our public value model, but first we will explore in more detail the definitions of co-production which have been suggested in this Handbook.

Definitions of User and Community Co-production We review in Table 2.1 the wide range of definitions to which reference has been made in the different chapters of this Handbook. (For penetrating analyses of the definitions used in the ‘classic’ articles on co-production up to the 1980s, see Brudney and England (1983) and Percy (1984). For an insightful discussion of more recent co-production definitions, see Brandsen and Honingh 2016). This table mainly focuses on a range of characteristics of co-production highlighted in the literature, including: • Does the definition of co-production refer to co-production of services or outcomes or both? • Are co-producing citizens just service users or can they also be members of the community? • Is co-production an activity contributing to the work of a public service organisation (‘organisation-specific’) or is it an activity related more widely to improving a public service or publicly desired outcome? • Does the definition cover all Four Co’s (co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery, co-assessment) or just some of them? • Do the co-producers within public service organisations include the frontline staff, other professionals, managers, politicians and Board members—or just some of these? The table also highlights other distinctive concepts in each definition which make it unusual.

Definition of co-production

‘Co-production involves a mixing of the productive efforts of regular and consumer producers. This mixing may occur directly, involving coordinated effort in the same production process, or indirectly through independent, yet related efforts of regular producer and consumer producers’

‘Citizen co-productive activities, or “consumer production”, are voluntary efforts of individuals or groups to enhance the quality and/or quantity of services they receive. … [T]hree types of coproduction are distinguished according to the nature of the benefits achieved: individual, group, and collective’ and ‘… the mix of regular producer and consumer producer inputs that contribute to the production (rather than the destruction) of services’ (p. 62)

Author

Parks et al. (1981, 1002)

Brudney and England 1983, 59)

‘… coproduction involves voluntary, cooperative action in service delivery’

Focused on community members as well as service ‘consumers’

‘citizens are asked to pitch in and help insure the quality of life in their city’ (p. 59)

Outcome- as well as service-oriented

Distinguishes individual from group and collective co-production

Governments may mandate co-productive inputs even where they are not efficient, so co-production is not always voluntary ‘… co-production requires a “critical mix” of regular producer and consumer (citizen) activities’

(continued)

Not clear what how ‘critical’ is assessed

Focuses particularly on co-delivery but also accepts co-commissioning (‘transmission of preferences’) and co-assessment

Focused only on service ‘consumers’, not community members

Service-, not outcome-oriented

Mainly focused on co-delivery

Distinguishes ‘regular’ and ‘consumer’ producers

‘The key to efficiency in market arrangements [for co-production] is the capacity of consumers to choose the price and service mix they prefer’ (p. 1006)—often not possible with public services Not organisation-specific, rather focused on ‘same production process’

Disadvantages

Advantages

Key concepts

Table 2.1 Characteristics of definitions of co-production

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Ostrom (1996, 1073)

‘…the process through which inputs used to provide a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not in the same organization … Co-production implies that citizens can play an active role in producing public goods and services of consequence to them’ Definition focuses on ‘individuals’ only, but text considers community inputs, not simply individual inputs

Input contributions by individuals not in same organisation

‘Co-production is the Co-production requires that ‘both productive involvement consumer and regular producers urban residents can supply to undertake efforts to produce the the provision of urban same good or service’, without services’ the requirement that ‘productive efforts [be] taken through direct interaction of regular and consumer producers, only that their actions are undertaken more or less simultaneously’ (p. 433)

Percy, 1984, p. 431)

Key concepts

Definition of co-production

Author

Table 2.1 (continued)

Highlights ‘public good’ element of community co-production

Includes community members as well as service ‘consumers’ Makes explicit that co-producers need not be in same organisation

Focuses mainly on co-delivery but mentions also co-design

Definition focuses only on co-production of ‘public services of consequence to them’

Does not recognise that citizens can provide some inputs which professional staff cannot (‘experts in their own life experience’)

Service-, not outcome-oriented

Focused mainly on co-delivery but mentions co-commissioning and co-assessment

Not organisation-specific, rather focused on production of ‘same good or service’ Recognises that citizens can partially substitute for professional staff

Disadvantages

Advantages

34 E. LOEFFLER AND T. BOVAIRD

‘Co-production is any active behaviour by anyone outside the government agency which: • is conjoint with agency production or independent of it but prompted by some action of the agency • is at least partly voluntary • either intentionally or unintentionally creates private and/or public value, in the form of either outputs or services’ ‘The provision of services through regular long-term relationships between professionalized service providers (in any sector) and service users or other members of the community, where all the parties make substantial resource contributions’

Alford (2009, 23)

Bovaird (2007, 84)

Definition of co-production

Author

Emphasises ‘substantial resource contributions’ of co-producers, distinguishing it from looser participation Includes both service users and communities

‘Professionalized service providers (in any sector)’

Must involve substantial resource contributions

Includes service providers from all sectors

Includes outcomeoriented (‘public value’) activities, not just public services

‘Active behaviour’ of citizens

Must involve long-term relationships

Advantages

Key concepts

(continued)

Emphasises ‘long-term’, excluding one-off or short-term co-production activities

Service-, not outcome-oriented

Needs to be ‘prompted by some action of the agency’

Narrow definition, dependent on ‘government agency’ rather than ‘public service organisation’

Disadvantages

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Voorberg et al. (2015, 1347)

Co-production is considered as ‘the involvement of citizens in the (co-)implementation of public services - involvement in services which refer to the transfer of implementing activities in favour of citizens that in the past have been carried out by government’

‘Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change’ ‘Professionals and citizens making better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes and/or improved efficiency’

Boyle and Harris (2009, 11)

Bovaird and Loeffler (2013, 5)

Definition of co-production

Author

Table 2.1 (continued)

Includes all Four Co’s

Includes both service users and communities

Outcome- as well as service-oriented

Includes public service organisations not in public sector Proposes (p. 1349) that ‘Co-creation’ is involvement of ‘co-creation/cocitizens in the (co)-initiation or co-design—citizens as co-designers production is defined as a process of sense-making in means involvement regarding the which citizen involvement content and process of service delivery, while citizens as initiators is seen as having important means ‘taking up the initiative to political value’ formulate specific services’

Specifies the Four Co’s as four distinct modes of co-production—co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment)

Includes both service users and communities

Equal and reciprocal relationship Emphasises how unequal power can damage co-production activities

Advantages

Key concepts

Labels co-commissioning (‘co-initiation’) and co-design as ‘co-creation’, omits co-assessment

Focuses on co-delivery (‘co-implementation’)

Strongly focused on services, not outcomes

Does not discuss criteria for balancing better outcomes against improved efficiency

Excludes public sector actors other than ‘professionals’ (managers, politicians, other staff)

Not clear how much power inequality negates ‘co-productive’ relationship

Includes ‘professionals’, not others in public service organisations

Service-, not outcome-oriented

Disadvantages

36 E. LOEFFLER AND T. BOVAIRD

‘Coproduction is a relationship between a paid employee of an organization and (groups of) individual citizens that requires a direct and active contribution from these citizens to the work of the organization’ … and ‘the direct input of citizens in the individual design and delivery of a service during the production phase’ ‘Representative co-production’ is: ‘The joint and voluntary involvement of group representatives in evaluating, designing, and delivering public services that enable value co-creation for other group members’

Brandsen and Honingh (2016, 431)

Eriksson (2019, 298)

Definition of co-production

Author

Considers role of ‘representatives’, not just direct actions of citizens ‘Other group members’, not just service users, included

Includes three of the Four Co’s – co-assessment, co-design and co-delivery

(continued)

Appears to exclude co-commissioning of services

Excludes non-paid members of public service organisations (politicians, Board members)

Organisation-centred Excludes co-commissioning and does not mention co-assessment

Service-, not outcome-oriented

Includes both service users and communities

There can be a coerced element—‘the extent of coproduction is the result of a combination of technical characteristics, legal rules, and voluntary choices’ (p. 432) Recognises the need to ‘depart from a single usage of the term “coproduction” and start using conceptually more distinct varieties’ (p. 433)

Disadvantages

Advantages

Key concepts

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Definition of co-production

Strokosch and Public Service Logic defines Osborne, 2020, this co-production as ‘the active volume and voluntary involvement of the citizens in the management and delivery of public services alongside public service staff. It is hence an extrinsic form of participation, controlled by public service staff who influence its formulation, implementation and transformative impact. The PSO therefore actively drives the value co-creation process by inviting service users to engage in service production through co-production’ McCulloch (2020, ‘Co-production as the mix of this volume) activities that public service agents and citizens contribute to in the progression of public service outcomes’

Author

Table 2.1 (continued)

Includes all Four Co’s (but does not mention them in definition)

‘Citizens … have a direct and indirect relationship with the outcome(s) being progressed’

Citizens as individuals, groups and collectives

Outcomes-oriented, not just service-oriented

Does not specifically define what is included in ‘mix of activities’… … nor who is included in ‘public service agents’

Excludes non-staff members of public service organisations (politicians, Board members)

Pays little attention to co-assessment

Sees public service staff controlling co-production—focuses on ‘inside-out’ co-production

Differentiates two intrinsic (co-experience and co-construction) and two extrinsic (co-production and co-design) processes of participation, giving attention to value created in service use, not simply in service production

Also define kindred concepts of ‘co-experience’, ‘co-construction’ and ‘co-design’ which overlap with many aspects of co-production Contributions by citizens must be voluntary

Disadvantages

Advantages

Key concepts

38 E. LOEFFLER AND T. BOVAIRD

Definition of co-production

‘Public service organizations and citizens making better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes or improved efficiency’

Author

Loeffler (2021)

Outcome- as well as service-oriented

Includes the Four Co’s—co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment

Includes all public service organisations and their actors (staff, managers, Board members, politicians)

Includes all Four Co’s

Includes both service users and communities

Advantages

Key concepts Does not discuss criteria for balancing better outcomes against improved efficiency

Disadvantages

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It has long been understood that, in many services, the acts of production and consumption are essentially inseparable, requiring the simultaneous contributions of both producers and consumers, so that some level of coproduction is inevitable. However, that is not the issue which the authors in this book are addressing—they are concerned rather with the question of what is the optimal mix of the contributions of each of the stakeholders—producers, consumers and ‘co-producers’—since there is almost always a range of choices available for this mix. This was the original question posed by the scholars in the Bloomington School and each of the definitions in Table 2.1 can be seen as ways of limiting the scope of inquiry to make this complex problem more tractable. It will be seen from Table 2.1 that a number of authors use the phrase ‘cocreation’ for some aspects of co-production, as we have defined it. A valuable commentary on the literature by Voorberg et al. (2015, 1347) summarises this debate: ‘… we concluded that in the literature the concepts of co-creation and co-production were often seen as interchangeable. There is empirically no striking difference between both concepts, and within bodies of knowledge different meanings are given to both concepts’. We feel this is a fair assessment of the current situation, so we do not give a separate definition of ‘co-creation’, although we recognise that the phrase ‘co-creation of value’ is often used to encapsulate the overall approach to using the Four Co’s to improve outcomes. Table 2.1 also makes clear that the term ‘citizens’ occurs in many definitions, without any attempt to define clearly the basis of this ‘citizenship’—e.g. does it apply only to residents with formal citizen status, or to all residents, or …? Since all co-production definitions are consistent with different citizenship concepts, we do not consider this issue further in the Handbook. One distinction from the literature which we have not coded in Table 2.1 is between ‘instrumental’ and ‘transformative’ co-production. As discussed in Chapter 1, the issue of whether co-production can bring about fully transformative change in society and citizen experiences or whether it is generally only instrumental in its effects is a theme in several chapters of this Handbook. However, as we have noted elsewhere (Loeffler and Bovaird 2016, 9), the organisational literature on ‘transformation’ is highly contested: there are few rigorous definitions of what constitutes ‘transformation’, no clarity on the relevant time scale within which change might qualify as ‘transformational’, no agreement on the criteria for when ‘transformation’ can be said to have occurred, and a huge variety of drivers or preconditions suggested as necessary for ‘transformational change’. Moreover, while many authors suggest co-production offers the potential for transformative change, it is noticeable that not many examples of ‘transformation’ of outcomes are presented in these chapters (with the exceptions of Chapters 16, 21, 28, 29 and 30)—and even where it is suggested to have occurred, it is generally not demonstrated that user and community co-production caused it. Indeed, where radical improvements in service outcomes and costs have indeed occurred, as for example

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in the Surrey CC Services for Young People (Bovaird and Loeffler 2014), many contributory factors in addition to co-production can usually be identified. Finally, the operational value of this distinction is unclear—it is generally not possible to know in advance that the inputs from the co-producers will be sufficient to achieve transformation—at least in complicated, complex and chaotic knowledge domains—so this distinction usually cannot be made a priori. Taking all these points into consideration, we regard this distinction between ‘instrumental’ and ‘transformative’ co-production to be generally unhelpful. Table 2.1 also includes three different definitions associated with the authors of this chapter. This could be seen, on the one hand, as overenthusiasm for writing definitions or, on the other hand, as an inability to make up our minds. However, our journey from the 2007 definition to the 2020 definition may be of some interest. The original (Bovaird 2007) definition has been widely cited in the academic literature but we quickly became convinced that it was incomplete—in particular, it excluded short-term coproduction activities, even when they might be of real significance, and it focused on public services, rather than outcomes—part of the UK tendency to conceptualise everything in the public domain as a ‘service’. Moreover, in common with many of these definitions, it conveyed little to policymakers or practitioners. Consequently, from 2009 onwards we developed a different approach to defining co-production—this is represented in Table 2.1 by the Bovaird and Loeffler (2013a) definition. This avoided the disadvantages of the Bovaird (2007) definition, highlighting that co-production was about the effect of both citizens and professionals in co-production on outcomes (or costs), whether in short or long term. This definition also has the advantage of focusing on a joint optimisation process—co-production is about the potential for both sides to benefit more thoroughly from each other’s assets, resources, capabilities and contributions. We have used this definition in our research, publications and training ever since. However, we have slowly become uneasy about this definition focusing purely on ‘professionals’ as the contributors from the public service organisation side of co-production activities, when clearly others might well be involved, including elected politicians in government organisations, Board members of non-profit organisations, managers and, perhaps most of all, frontline staff without professional qualifications. Consequently, Loeffler (2021) has made a slight change to our previous definition and this is the definition which lies behind the rest of this chapter and the final chapter of the Handbook: Public service organizations and citizens making better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes or improved efficiency.

However, the key message from this section is not our own preferred definition but rather that definitions depend on the purpose to which they are put—we agree with Brudney and England (1983, 61) when they suggest: ‘As with any

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definition, the issue is not whether the interpretations of co-production found in the literature are valid, but whether they are useful’. Consequently, we believe it is not sensible to seek to impose a single definition on the field. Rather, public service organisations should consider carefully which definition suits them (not simply taking a common definition ‘off the shelf’). From that point onwards, they should state clearly what they mean by ‘co-production’, make sure that this definition is known to those dealing with them, and stick to that definition—but understand that others may be using a different definition. At some stage, of course, they may find it useful to reconsider and change the definition they use—then the cycle starts again. In that way, we believe, it is possible to use language to communicate, not to dominate.

Co-production as a Pathway to Public Value Co-production is not undertaken for its own sake. As discussed in the previous section, it can be seen to be either a pathway to improving public services or publicly valued outcomes. We therefore need a conceptual framework within which to locate co-production. In Fig. 2.1 we present the Governance International Public Value Model, which demonstrates a range of pathways by which co-production can add public value. In this model, we define public value as the balance between the achievement of priority public quality of life outcomes and priority public governance principles (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019). This is a different definition of public value from that used by Moore (1995), but our Public Value Model is consistent with Moore’s ‘strategic triangle’, while giving more detail and being more operational. In Moore’s approach, public value is created through the production of services valued by stakeholders (at low cost), within a system which provides legitimacy and political support, and also ensures the operational and administrative capacity of the public services system (Moore 1995, 71). Our Public Value Model in Fig. 2.1 contains elements which address each of these concepts—public services valued by citizens are commissioned by the public sector, legitimacy and political support are specific examples of wider public governance principles which are imposed on the whole system, and the capacity of public service organisations determines how well their services provide outcomes to different stakeholders. However, our Public Value Model goes further to highlight explicitly that the expressed demands of different stakeholders must be politically mediated to arrive at publicly defined ‘needs’. Some of these needs are met by the public services which are commissioned by the public sector but which can be provided by public, private or third sector provider organisations, or from partnerships between them. In Fig. 2.1 the horizontal arrows from providers show how these commissioned services produce quality-of-life outcomes for individual service users (user value), communities (social value) and for businesses (economic value). This is the traditional pathway to outcomes assumed by most public managers and policymakers.

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Fig. 2.1 The Governance International public value model (Source Adapted from Loeffler and Bovaird [2019])

However, the Model makes clear that prioritised needs can be met not only by providers of commissioned public services but also by citizen behaviour change or their co-production with public service organisations. For example, if people are encouraged to adopt a healthier lifestyle, they are likely to stay healthy longer and, as a result of this behaviour change, fewer health and care services will be required. The same result may eventuate if people who are ex-substance abusers co-produce by giving peer group support (alongside inputs by public service organisations such as training of peer supporters) to people who are attempting to rehabilitate. In these ways, citizens who change their behaviour or take part in co-production activities are likely to increase their self-confidence and self-esteem—and in the case of co-production, also to improve their own level of social contact and feel less isolated. All of these outcomes are valuable in themselves, although not directly part of the commissioned services which they may also be helping to co-produce. Such pathways are shown in Fig. 2.1 by the vertical arrows to the quality-of-life outcomes desired by service users, communities and the business sector.

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Moreover, the Model highlights how behaviour change and user and community co-production are often intertwined in a close and complex interrelationship, in which both can be the cause or the effect of the other. Where behaviour change is encouraged and enabled by public service organisations, it is itself a form of co-production—this happens, for example, where substance abusers respond to treatment and reduce their level of dependence. Where behaviour change is self-driven by service users or community members, it can have the positive effect of increasing the ability of those citizens to contribute to co-production activities of public service organisations—for example, where recovering drug users volunteer to act as peer mentors to current addicts. Finally, by directly involving citizens in how public services are conceived, planned and delivered, co-production may be especially effective in bringing about behaviour change, as direct experience may be a more convincing trigger to putting their life right, as compared to being subjected to publicity campaigns or having their choices framed for them in controlled ‘nudges’— e.g. where peer mentors gain so much self-confidence and self-esteem that they entirely kick their drug habit and raise their ambitions to achieve challenging qualifications and more rewarding employment. The Public Value Model in Fig. 2.1 goes still further—it highlights the importance that resilience plays in creating and maintaining public value, since co-production affects the capacity of a stakeholder (either commissioning and provider organisations or service users, communities and other stakeholders in the overall system) to cope with disruption to their current quality-of-life outcomes. This is an issue which has been largely neglected in co-production research to date (Bovaird and Quirk 2017)—but see the thought-provoking discussion by Coaffee, Albuquerque and Pitidis (Chapter 28) in this volume. Finally, the Model highlights that it is essential that public governance principles inform both the way in which services are commissioned and provided, and the ways in which co-production and behaviour change are mobilised. Here we see a critically important difference between value creation in the public sphere and in private markets: ‘the ends do not justify the means’. Co-production must therefore be implemented in full accord with public governance principles, which are likely to include, among others, transparency, accountability, fairness and due process, the equalities agenda and sustainability. Moreover, these principles, and the priorities between them, must be at least partly co-produced with citizens. Clearly, in co-production contexts, these public governance principles should cover the behaviour of both citizens and public service organisations. Accountability should mean that each should be able to hold each other to account for how well they have performed their agreed contributions. Similarly, transparency should mean that both professional staff and citizens should be open with each other about what they are up to in their co-produced activities, both sets of co-producers should act fairly towards each other, and co-production practices should involve behaviour which is sustainable by both parties. Through this relationship of reciprocity, co-production may make it

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more likely that these public governance principles will be adhered to by the co-producers themselves. Indeed, the achievement of these public governance principles can be seen as a separate set of outcomes to which co-production can make an important contribution. Co-production therefore plays four major roles in this Public Value Model: • co-production can enable services commissioned by the public sector to achieve higher levels of quality-of-life outcomes through making better use of the contributions of citizens (either service users or community members); • co-production can enable publicly desired outcomes to be achieved by citizen co-producers who help public service organisations but without the need for formal public services (e.g. community members informally checking on and chatting with elderly or infirm neighbours as a result of public campaigns for more solidarity during the COVID-19 crisis, without having to register with public service organisations as formal volunteers); • co-production can strengthen the resilience of the outcomes of the overall public value system and each of its component parts (e.g. resilience of users, resilience of their communities, resilience of their individual provider organisations and resilience of the overall set of providers); • co-production can help to formulate public governance principles, decide the priority between them, and ensure that they are adhered to in the public realm—and co-production must itself be practised in accordance with these public governance principles. At the same time as these major roles, we should recognise that co-production may enter into all of the other elements of Fig. 2.1 to some extent. For example, although directly elected politicians may have final responsibility for determining publicly recognised ‘needs’, they are likely to seek and take into account the views of citizens in their decisions—indeed, this is often a key element of the co-commissioning of public services, as we will see later in this chapter. Again, the operation of public service organisations may be partly influenced by citizen representatives on their boards (although this is typically much more important in third sector organisations, rather than in public or private sector organisations). And how service users, communities or businesses experience and assess their own outcomes does not emerge simply from their own interior reflections but is at least partly influenced, in a co-productive relationship, by the interactions which these stakeholders have with people in public service organisations, such as teachers, doctors, social workers, etc. Finally, this is a Public Value model and does not purport to represent the full range of ways in which civil society creates value through individual self-help and the self-organisation of communities—aspects of life which may be responsible for much higher levels of value creation than either the public domain

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or the market system. However, there is clearly a strong two-way relationship between this public value model and value creation in civil society—successful self-help and self-organisation reduce the need for public sector interventions and vice versa. Moreover, skills developed in co-production of public value may contribute substantially to self-help and self-organisation and vice versa. This chapter focuses on co-production but it will always be important to keep in mind these interrelationships with purely civil society modes of value creation. Finally, we need to recognise that the Public Value Model in Fig. 2.1 is very likely to represent a complex adaptive system. This is evident not only because the model is circular, as opposed to being simply linear, but also because there are so many linkages between elements within the model itself. This has important consequences for the planning, implementation and evaluation of co-production initiatives. The basic lesson from complexity sciences is that ‘context matters’, because it is co-created at the same time as the outcome targets and the policy levers which public policymakers put in place (Bovaird 2013). Putting substantial faith in clear cause-and-effect chains, either in setting strategy or in evaluating policy, may work well in some parts of the service system, where we are working within simple or even ‘complicated’ knowledge domains but is entirely inappropriate in the ‘complex’ (never mind the ‘chaotic’) knowledge domain. Here, we cannot predict likely positive or negative co-production outcomes of the interventions by either professionals or citizens—the best we can do is to experiment and sense what works and what doesn’t (Loeffler 2021). Of course, even in complex adaptive systems there remains a role for meta-planning—however, far from predicting the direct consequences of co-production interventions, this must limit itself to attempting to influence the envelope of feasible system outcomes by shaping the underlying parameters of the system. Public policy evaluation has long taught us that clarity of long-term impacts is difficult to operationalise even in the best of circumstances but it is not even a sensible goal in the complex knowledge domain (Bovaird 2012). What does this mean for co-production? It may well be that many coproduction initiatives are undertaken in the simple or complicated knowledge domains, so that linear models are applicable. However, the very nature of co-production, as highlighted in Fig. 2.1, suggests that it often takes place within complex adaptive systems. As Jon Pierre (2013) suggests, such situations, where context is so important, may mean that generalization, and therefore ‘cumulative science’, is very difficult. However, the corollary may be that some aspects of public policy and management will remain relatively impervious to ‘science’ in the narrow sense, and be better dealt with by craft or art—and this should not be regarded as a defeat for ‘knowledge’ but rather a recognition of the need to contextualise what kinds of knowledge are relevant in tackling different classes of problem (Bovaird 2013).

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Co-production as Citizen Voice and Citizen Action: The Four Co’s As Table 2.1 highlights, many of the early writers on co-production focused on the role of citizens in the co-delivery of public services. Part of their intent was clearly to point out how citizen contributions to the public domain were not simply confined to public consultation and participation, topics which had been of great interest in public administration since the 1960s. However, it was inevitable that this attention to ‘citizen action’ would eventually be aligned with the preceding interest in ‘citizen voice’. This was not only because citizens themselves saw their contributions as holistic but also because the analysis of citizens’ role in co-delivery very quickly threw up that citizens were often involved in co-design of the services which they were co-delivering. Co-design, in turn, often followed from complaints about services, which also sometimes stimulated discussions of alternative forms of public interventions to achieve outcomes which current services could not achieve cost-effectively. Consequently, there have many suggestions over the past decades as to how the co-production concept could be disaggregated into different approaches to co-production—for example, Bovaird and Loeffler (2012) listed co-planning, co-design, co-prioritisation, co-financing, co-managing, co-delivery and co-assessment (including co-monitoring and co-evaluation). Others quickly added in co-decision, co-governance, co-implementation, co-construction, etc., leading to Coaffee and colleagues (in this volume) describing these approaches generically as ‘co-ubiquity’. In order to simplify, we suggested in 2013 that most of these various terms, each valuable for specific purposes, can usefully be aggregated into the Four Co’s—co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013a): • Co-commissioning of services and outcomes, which embraces: – Co-planning of policy—e.g. deliberative participation, citizens assemblies, – Co-prioritisation of services—e.g. participatory budgeting (macroscale), personal budgets (micro-scale), stakeholder groups on budget committees. – Co-financing of services—e.g. crowdfunding, local fundraising. • Co-design of services—e.g. user forums, service design labs. • Co-delivery of services and outcomes, which embraces: – Co-management of services—e.g. community management of public assets (such as libraries, community centres, youth clubs, sports facilities), school governors. – Co-implementation of services—e.g. peer support groups, Neighbourhood Watch, Speed Watch).

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• Co-assessment (including co-monitoring and co-evaluation) of services and outcomes—e.g. tenant inspectors, user online ratings. As well as simplifying what can otherwise be a confused and confusing narrative, distinguishing the Four Co’s in this way is in line with the spirit of the recommendation by Brandsen and Honingh (2016, 433) that ‘we must depart from a single usage of the term ‘co-production’ and start using conceptually more distinct varieties’. In the interpretation of the Four Co’s, it is important to remember our argument that not all public sector contributions to public value are through the medium of public services—e.g. tackling inequality is a common policy objective but its achievement requires a raft of policies, strategies, regulatory mechanisms, taxation and welfare benefits, as well as public services. Consequently, we need to see the Four Co’s as being about the achievement of outcomes, as well as services. Of course, this framework has its limitation. The boundaries between the Four Co’s are not watertight—for example, co-commissioning of which services are high priority can depend on how those services are designed, so both activities need to be done simultaneously. Similarly, the practical codesign of a service may benefit greatly from experience of co-delivery, so these two elements of co-production may valuably be intertwined. Again, Strokosch and Osborne, in this volume, define ‘co-construction’ as the two-way process of public service delivery, by which service users, their networks and service providers act jointly to frame the value and outcomes that they can derive from service delivery (and, indeed, from their whole-life experience), which is an intertwining of co-delivery and co-commissioning. Moreover, not all the ‘co-ubiquitous’ words fit neatly into this framework. The phrase ‘co-decide’ is quite common and clearly could apply to any of the Four Co’s. The phrase ‘co-governance’, in so far as it is applied to citizens (rather than third sector organisations) typically has three quite distinct meanings—one is an element of co-commissioning, namely where citizens help set to set the strategy of public service organisations by prioritising goals, outcomes, services, etc. The second is an element of co-management, where citizens play a role in the management of public service organisations or public services. Third, it describes the co-assessment role of citizens in ensuring that public governance principles are adhered to by public service organisations. However, the distinction between the Four Co’s is not simply an academic exercise—it has important real-world consequences. First, three of the Four Co’s are about citizen voice—co-commissioning, co-design and coassessment—while co-delivery is about citizen action. Generally, the people who get involved are quite different between these two kinds of coproduction—citizens who are most often involved in citizen action are often relatively uninterested in the typical manifestations of citizen voice—meetings, committees, writing letters, making complaints, etc. And, similarly, people who

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are highly effective at making their voice heard may be rather unwilling— indeed, they may feel they simply have not got the time—to put in the hours needed to patrol in StreetWatch, pick up litter in public parks, visit and comfort local neighbours and attend fires as volunteer fire fighters. One of the main reasons for respecting the advice from Brandsen and Honingh (2016, 433) to ‘start using more conceptual varieties’ of co-production is to ensure that recruitment of citizens for co-production takes into account for which of the Four Co’s a particular citizen has appropriate strengths and interests. A further practical consequence of this distinction between citizen voice and citizen action is the need to reconceptualise the role of citizens in democracy. This is often discussed in terms of citizens’ rights and responsibilities in decision-making, i.e. in using their voice to effect change. However, coproduction through citizen action may be at least as powerful a way of effecting change in society by making citizens’ beliefs, values and priorities evident and then realising them through social activities. Co-production of the people, by the people and for the people may have a governance significance which is much wider than simply its effect on public services and outcomes.

Change Management of Co-production: The Co-production Star Model One important theme which has been given little attention in the coproduction literature is the change management process which can expedite the move to greater and more intensive co-production on the part of both citizens and members of public service organisations. In this section, we highlight one change management tool which has been used successfully in practical settings to develop, test and scale co-production approaches—the Governance International Co-Production Star (Fig. 2.2). In the inner ring of this figure

Fig. 2.2 The Governance International Co-production Star (Copyright @ Governance International [2013])

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are the Four Co’s of co-production, while the outer area has the five change management steps—mapping existing co-production initiatives, focussing on those with the highest impact, involving the right people, inside and outside the organisation, who can make the strategy succeed, marketing it to the sceptics and growing it within and beyond the organisation (Loeffler and Hine-Hughes 2013). Step 1: Map It! Most public service organisations are already taking some steps to increase the effectiveness of at least one of the Four Co’s. However, they are often only dimly aware of how much their staff are already doing, have recently tried or are wishing to experiment with co-production approaches. Consequently, mapping recent, current and potential future co-production initiatives is key to making sensible decisions on the direction in which to take coproduction. This mapping will be most powerful when it blends creativity with existing knowledge, so it needs to bring in the experience of a wide range of stakeholders, but especially frontline staff, service users who are ‘experts by experience’ and people with knowledge of innovative practices from national and international case studies. Such mapping exercises will also be more informative when they separate the four modes of co-production— co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment—so that future ways forward under each mode can be considered. Step 2: Focus It! Mapping what is already being done and what potential future co-production initiatives might be undertaken provides a list of options for developing the next steps. Prioritisation is then essential—the issue is how to focus strategically on the areas where co-production is likely to work best and be the most cost-effective way of achieving outcomes. This clearly needs to be done separately for each of the Four Co’s. While there will often be ‘quick wins’, the case for which is obvious, there is likely to be a much longer list of co-production initiatives which are promising but uncertain in the outcome and efficiency gains which they might bring. In selecting the options to take forward, an outline business case for each is likely to be helpful, especially for those co-production activities which involve significant spend or which mean a major change in direction in a service. However, given what we have said above about working in a complex knowledge domain, it will be important to undertake a range of creative options, even though they appear to have a significant risk of failure, since what works and what doesn’t work will more likely emerge from experience and experimentation than from prior planning.

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Step 3: People It! The third step is to determine who are going to be the co-producers in the initial piloting of each co-production initiative which has been prioritised in step 2. It will be important to have committed, motivated and skilled individuals to take these experiments forward in a creative way. In order to identify who can make which contributions, it is helpful to undertake ‘capabilities assessments’ with all involved co-producers, which can complement the more common ‘needs assessment’ process in public services. These identify the strengths, assets and potential contributions that co-producers might make to improving their own outcomes and those of other citizens. This information helps to identify the citizens and staff who are either actual or potential co-producers, and who can then work together in innovative and practical co-production initiatives in which they themselves want to be engaged. There are various ways in which experimentation can occur but our experience has been that ‘Co-production Labs’, based on design principles, are especially effective in generating ‘buy-in’, not only from citizens but also from staff members (Loeffler and Schulze-Böing 2020). Other stakeholders, too, can be valuable participants. Step 4: Market It! Co-production can only work if the stakeholders involved are committed to making it successful. Although there is a significant literature on what motivates citizens and staff to co-produce (see Chapters 25 and 26 in this volume), there is much less research on policy mechanisms which can activate these motivations in practice, so keeping current co-producers on board and attracting new people who want to join in. A key element of such mechanisms is likely to be providing evidence of how successful co-production can be in appropriate circumstances. This can be partly achieved through formal evaluation approaches (Loeffler and Bovaird 2018) but, in complex adaptive systems, may be more convincing when undertaken through rapid appraisal to weed out non-effective options and highlight those options likely to be most cost-effective. Of course, when the number of options has been reduced, more thorough evaluation becomes more desirable, if feasible. However, even when substantial evidence is available that co-production works (or, in some cases, that it doesn’t), it is unrealistic to expect that policymakers will be convinced—as Tinna Nielsen points out in Chapter 5, decisions are often made on non-rational grounds rather than on evidence, so these non-rational drivers also need to be emphasised when marketing the potential role of co-production.

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Step 5: Grow It! Experimenting with and demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of specific coproduction initiatives is only the first part of the story. Scaling up successful co-production (and stopping ineffective co-production) requires the willingness, both in public service organisations and in civil society, to change old cultures, beliefs and habits. This means that the co-producers (both citizens and public service organisations) have to exhibit the positive characteristics of a willingness to change (adaptability, innovativeness, entrepreneurialism, risk-accepting) and at the same time have the capabilities to overcome the barriers to co-production (organisational, contextual, user-characteristicsderived, community-characteristics-derived). In Fig. 2.3 we set out in more detail a conceptual model for understanding this set of barriers. Clearly, in order for these barriers to be overcome, a range of strategies will be needed on the part of all the stakeholders involved—this will involve user strategies to tackle the user-characteristics-derived barriers (e.g. a developmental strategy to improve users’ skills needed for co-production), community strategies to tackle the community-characteristics-derived barriers (e.g. a digital networking strategy to increase social connectedness in the community) and organisational strategies to overcome organisational barriers (e.g. a risk enablement strategy in order for public service organisations to become open to more promising opportunities for co-production). In the process of growing the co-production approach, the role of citizens is likely to be critically important. Community champions who have been ‘early adopters’ can help to inspire and mobilise other members of their communities, e.g. by making presentations in co-production roadshows, writing blogs, and visiting community groups to activate more participants.

Case Study: Implementing the Co-production Star in Jobcenter MainArbeit, Germany Jobcenter MainArbeit in the State of Hesse has had a long-standing reputation in Germany as a particularly innovative employment agency. It is a municipal agency (Eigenbetrieb), managed and governed by the City of Offenbach, near Frankfurt am Main, with about 125,000 inhabitants, including a high proportion of migrants. In 2019 a core group of about 30 staff members of Jobcenter Mainarbeit and representatives of third sector organisations embarked on a co-production journey, based on the Co-production Star (Loeffler and Schulze-Böing 2020). The first workshop enabled participants to shape new co-production initiatives, based on extensive mapping of current co-production and ideas for potential new initiatives. Participants were surprised to identify that many of their activities already involved elements of co-production—but they also recognised that, apart from a few exceptions, there was underused potential to strengthen co-production in many counselling and job placement activities. This raised

Age Gender

Perception of one’s capabilities Past co-production experience Current co-production behaviour Perception of service provider organisation (satisfaction with the information provided and satisfaction with performance) Low levels of trust on the part of users in working with staff

Perception about one’s own capabilities Opportunities for user coproduction

-

Barriers from organisational characteristics

BARRIERS TO CO-PRODUCTION

Barriers from community characteristics

Lack of resources (budget, staff numbers, staff time) Lack of staff skills Lack of incentives for staff Current co-production behaviour of staff Low levels of trust by staff in capabilities of users/ communities Lack of use of digital technologies Lack of use of non-digital enabling technologies Lack of risk enablement strategy Lack of organisational leadership Organisational cultures do not support co-production Perception of over-bureaucratic regulations Performance management Commissioning, in particular, contract management Poor communication within organisation Poor communication with users/communities Lack of effective change management Benefits distributed to organisations not contributing to costs Lack of organisational learning Political short-termism

Barriers from user characteristics Age Education level Employment status

Low perception of one’s capabilities Past co-production experience Current co-production behaviour Perception of service provider organisation (satisfaction with government consultationsj)

Low perception of communities about their own capabilities Lack of opportunities for community co-production

-

Lack of social connectedness Low active membership in community associations Lack of community leadership Lack of trust within civil society Low levels of trust on the part of communities in working with staff

Barriers arising from community relationships

-

-

Ability to co-produce

-

Willingness to co-produce

-

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USER AND COMMUNITY CO-PRODUCTION OF PUBLIC VALUE

Fig. 2.3 Conceptual model of barriers to co-production (Copyright Governance International [2018])

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Ability of users to co-produce

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Willingness of users to co-produce (now and in the future)

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Barriers from context

Location of co-production (metropolitan-urban-rural) Modes of governance of specific public services Lack of scientific evidence of results of co-production Administrative culture in specific countries

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the question of where to start? The second Co-Production Star Workshop involved an iterative prioritisation process, enabling participants to reflect on which co-production initiatives were most likely to improve key outcomes— and directly stimulating a debate on which quality of life outcomes were most important for Jobcenter Mainarbeit. The third Co-production Star Workshop prepared participants for the CoProduction Labs by introducing them to the methodology of the Governance International Co-design toolkit, identifying potential risks and providing them with space to discuss how to approach and invite service users to join each specific Co-Production Lab. Participation of service users was agreed to be completely voluntary. Furthermore, the Chief Executive of the Jobcenter made it clear that the Labs were free to experiment, even it this led to ‘mistakes’, as long as they learnt from them and shared the lessons. Governance International supported the Labs during the 100 days of experimentation (which were extended to 120 days as they started during the summer holiday period) with facilitation of meetings with service users and workbooks to document the lessons learnt. Altogether five Co-Production Labs were launched involving the following co-production initiatives: • Co-commissioning ‘personal employability budgets’ with young jobseekers. • Co-designing a ‘Citizen Symposium’ with service users getting ready for retirement. • Co-designing service offers from Luise 34, a social enterprise for the unemployed. • Co-delivering peer support for and with people seeking a job. • Co-assessing training courses and other projects with participants. The Co-production Labs progressed at different speeds but all managed to test some small-scale actions and to share the learning with the other Labs. The fourth Workshop provided the Co-Production Lab teams with tools to develop pathways to outcomes and assess changes to quality of life outcomes, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In the fifth Workshop the participants identified barriers to co-production within and beyond their organisation and discussed strategies for overcoming them in order to scale their successful coproduction initiatives. The teams also discussed the limits to co-production in employment services and agreed that not all services provided by the Jobcenter Mainarbeit and its partners would be suitable for co-production. The five Co-Production Lab teams presented the lessons learnt and initial evidence of the results of their Lab at a Co-production Celebration Event at the end of the year, which provided all co-producers with the opportunity to value the contributions everybody had made and to reflect together on the next steps. While some Co-Production Labs considered that a redesign of their initial co-production strategy was necessary, other Labs wished to scale

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their prototype projects and work with other groups—this was particularly the case with the Lab developing a peer support mechanism for young job seekers (Neseli and Herpich 2020), where the initial experiment proved to be very successful, motivating staff to extend this approach to other areas of work in Jobcenter Mainarbeit.

Summary Co-production is, above all, a collaborative practice. When this practice is formally approved by a public service organisation, it acquires the status of a policy or a strategy. And when it becomes the accepted and expected way of doing things—which is not yet very common in the public domain but is sometimes the case in community development or neighbourhood management—it can be considered an institution. It is generally voluntary, i.e. not legally mandated nor regulated—although some authors (e.g. Bertelli and Cannas in this volume) argue that in some circumstances it could indeed become mandatory. We take the stance that such coercion is only likely to work if it is short-term, leading co-producers to recognise the value of the collaborative actions, after which they then can join in voluntarily. Co-production is not an ideology, although it is given very strong backing by adherents of some ideologies, especially those which give major weight to participative democracy, subsidiarity and decentralised power. Whether or not it is a normative concept is also an issue on which authors in the literature (and this Handbook) differ. Some do appear to regard co-production as a ‘good’ practice, always to be encouraged. However, most caution that there can be a downside to co-production (see especially Smith in Chapter 31 of this Handbook). We take the stance that co-production, as a concept, is about a practice which can have both positive and negative sides, so needs to be examined critically. Although there are already many contending definitions of co-production, they still have a common core of elements which means that user and community co-production of public services and outcomes remains a relatively coherent theme in the social sciences literature. Moreover, most definitions contain elements of both citizen action and citizen voice, and most approaches to co-production can be categorised as falling within the range of the Four Co’s—co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment. Co-production plays a key role in creating public value—it can help to improve publicly desired outcomes directly, to make public services more costeffective, to strengthen whole-system resilience and to support the achievement of public governance principles. By the same token, its absence or its misapplication can reduce public value.

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Understanding of the change management necessary to operationalise greater and more cost-effective co-production remains relatively underdeveloped. In this chapter, we have suggested a five-step change management process which has recently proved valuable in some practical settings. However, further research on this would seem an urgent priority.

References Alford, J. (2009). Engaging Public Sector Clients: From Service-Delivery to Coproduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bovaird, T. (2007). Beyond Engagement and Participation—User and Community Co-production of Public Services. Public Administration Review, 67(5): 846–860. Bovaird, T. (2012). Attributing Outcomes to Social Policy Interventions—‘Gold Standard’ or ‘Fool’s Gold’ in Public Policy and Management? Social Policy and Administration, 48(1), 1–23. Bovaird, T. (2013). Context in Public Policy: Implications of Complexity Theory. In Christopher Pollitt (Ed.), Context in Public Policy and Management: The Missing Link? Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2012). From Engagement to Co-production: How Users and Communities Contribute to Public Services. In Victor Pestoff, Taco Brandsen & Bram Verschuere (Eds.), New Public Governance, the Third Sector and Co-production. London: Routledge. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2013a). We’re All in This Together: Harnessing User and Community Co-production of Public Outcomes. In C. Staite (Ed.), Making Sense of the Future: Do We Need a New Model of Public Services? Birmingham: INLOGOV. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2013b). The Role of Co-production for Better Health and Well-Being: Why We Need to Change. In Elke Loeffler, Tony Bovaird, Gerry Power, & Frankie Hine-Hughes (Eds.), Co-production of Health and Wellbeing in Scotland. Birmingham: Governance International with Scottish Government. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2014). The New Commissioning Model of Services for Young People in Surrey: Evaluation of Achievements and Implications. Report to Surrey County Council. Birmingham: INLOGOV and Governance International. Bovaird, T., & Quirk, B. (2017). Resilience in Public Administration: Moving from Risk Avoidance to Assuring Public Policy Outcomes Through the Resilience Chain. In Thomas R. Klassen, Denita Cepiku, & T. J. Lah (Eds.), Handbook of Global Public Policy and Administration. London: Routledge. Boyle, D., & Harris, M. (2009). The Challenge of Co-production: How Equal Partnerships Between Professionals and the Public Are Crucial to Improving Public Services. London: Nef and NESTA. Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2016). Distinguishing Different Types of Coproduction: A Conceptual Analysis Based on the Classical Definitions. Public Administration Review, 76(3), 427–435. Brudney, J. F., & England, R. F. (1983). Toward a Definition of the Coproduction Concept. Public Administration Review, 43(1), 59–65. Eriksson, E.M. (2019). Representative Co-production: Broadening the Scope of the Public Service Logic. Public Management Review, 21(2), 291–314. https://doi. org/10.1080/14719037.2018.1487575.

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Loeffler, E. (2021). Co-production of Public Services and Outcomes. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Loeffler, E., & Bovaird, T. (2016). User and Community Co-Production of Public Services: What Does the Evidence Tell Us? International Journal of Public Administration, 39(13), 1006–19. Loeffler, E., & Bovaird, T. (2018). Assessing the Effect of Co-production on Outcomes, Service Quality and Efficiency . In Taco Brandsen, Trui Steen & Bram Verschuere (Eds.), Co-production and Co-creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Service Delivery (pp. 269–280). London: Routledge. Loeffler, E., & Bovaird, T. (2019). Co-commissioning of Public Services and Outcomes in the UK: Bringing Co-Production into the Strategic Commissioning Cycle, Public Money & Management, 39(4), 241–252. Loeffler, E., & Hine-Hughes, F. (2013). Five Steps to Making the Transformation to Co-production. In Elke Loeffler, Tony Bovaird, Gerry Power, & Frankie HineHughes (Eds.), Co-production of Health and Wellbeing in Scotland. Birmingham: Governance International with Scottish Government. Loeffler, E., & Schulze-Böing, M. (2020). Co-production Star Action Learning Programme in the Offenbach Employment Agency: Results and Lessons from the Five Co-production Labs. Governance International Case Study. Birmingham: Governance International. Moore, Mark H. (1995). Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. Cambridge MASS: Harvard University Press. Neseli, A., & Herpich, C. (2020). Job Seekers Providing Peer Support for Each Other in the Offenbach Job Agency. Governance International Case Study. Birmingham: Governance International. Ostrom, E. (1996). Crossing the Great Divide: Coproduction, Synergy and Development. World Development, 24(6), 1073–1087. Parks, R. B., Baker, P., Kiser, L. Oakerson, R., Ostrom, E., Ostrom, V., Percy, S., Vandivort, M., Whitaker, G., & Wilson, R. (1981). Consumers as Co-producers of Public Services: Some Economic and Institutional Considerations. Policy Studies Journal, 9(7), 1001–1011. Percy, S. L. (1984). Citizen Participation in the Coproduction of Urban Services. Urban Affairs Review, 19(4), 431–446. Pierre, J. (2013). Context, Theory and Rationality: An Uneasy Relationship? In Christopher Pollitt (Ed.), Context in Public Policy and Management: The Missing Link? Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Voorberg, W. H., Bekkers, V. J. J. M., & Tummers, L. G. (2015). A Systematic Review of Co-creation and Co-production: Embarking on the Social Innovation Journey. Public Management Review, 17(9), 1333–1357.

PART II

Disciplinary Roots of Co-production

CHAPTER 3

Co-production in Political Science and Public Administration Jeffrey L. Brudney

Co-production in Political Science and Public Administration Perhaps some wise sage can explain when an idea will catch on in the social sciences, and when it will not, or even better, when an idea will catch on, fall completely out of fashion, only to return to prominence more than a decade later. The concept of ‘co-production’ reflects just such a history in political science and public administration. In an invited Keynote Address presented to leading scholars at the Annual Meeting of the International Institute for Administration Studies (IIAS) Study Group on Co-production of Public Services in 2017, I endeavoured to capture the circuitous journey of the co-production concept. In ‘Co-production: The Strange Tale of how “Sometimes the wrong train can take us to the right place”’—a title adapted from the Brazilian lyricist and novelist Paulo Coelho de Souza, which also served as the theme for the popular 2014 movie The Lunchbox—I concentrated on the sharp rise, precipitous fall and subsequent re-emergence of scholarship on the concept of co-production (Brudney 2020). In this chapter I review the origin of the co-production concept in political science and public administration, explain why the concept temporarily fell from view, and conclude with an exploration of the renewed interest in coproduction shown by scholars in these fields.

J. L. Brudney (B) University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, USA © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_3

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Origins The popularisation of the co-production concept in political science and public administration emanates from the collaboration of members of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University (Bloomington), led by Dr. Elinor Ostrom and Dr. Vincent Ostrom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although ‘Consumers as Co-producers of Public Services: Some Economic and Institutional Considerations’ by Parks et al. (1981) is the most fundamental (and cited) statement on co-production by the Indiana Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, it was not the first by its members. Parks et al. (1981, 1001) were careful to acknowledge that ‘This paper results from regular discussion among the several authors that have extended over the past 2 years’, which had already generated several publications by Workshop members (Percy 1978, 1979; Kiser and Percy 1980), including one by the Ostroms (1978) themselves and another by Whitaker (1980) in the highly regarded Public Administration Review. In addition, Sharp (1980), a student of Whitaker, had earlier published an examination of co-production on her own; Sharp reported therein that ‘Very recently, a number of further discussions of the concept of co-production have emerged, including … papers presented at the 1980 Annual Meetings of the American Society for Public Administration’ (p. 105). Equally, if not more important, Parks et al. (1981) drew on prior research by Fuchs (1968), Garn et al. (1976), and Gersuny and Rosengren (1973). These authors sought to reconceptualise the role of citizens in the service process from consumers only to more active participants. Building upon this research, Parks et al. (1981) succeeded in establishing co-production as an innovative and fruitful concept for political science and public administration. ‘Co-production’, wrote Parks et al. (1981, 1002), ‘involves a mixing of the productive efforts of regular and consumer producers. This mixing may occur directly, involving coordinated effort in the same production process, or indirectly through independent, yet related efforts of regular producer and consumer producers’. ‘Regular producers’ consist of paid service agents employed by government to create and deliver services; ‘consumer producers’ are individuals or groups who contribute to the production of some of the goods and services they receive or consume. For example, consumer–producers, i.e. citizens or residents, might assist regular producers, government service agents, in producing neighbourhood safety and security, beautification and solid waste collection. This perspective represented a marked departure to the reliance of scholars (and practitioners) in the late 1970s and early 1980s to view the work of regular producers in government bureaus and agencies as dominant in service delivery and to relegate efforts by citizen consumer–producers as supplementary or marginal, if not insignificant. By contrast, insisted Parks et al. (1981, 1002), ‘In many instances, consumer production is an essential complement to the efforts of regular producers; without the productive activities of consumers nothing of value will result. This appears to be characteristic of much public service production’.

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Surge and Decline in Co-production Research The formulation by Parks et al. (1981) and related research by the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University precipitated a surge in co-production scholarship in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Researchers identify a sharp decline in interest during the 1990s (Uzochukwu and Thomas 2018; Nabatchi et al. 2017; Bovaird 2007), though, which I attempt to explain in this section. Subsequently, I turn to the resurgence of scholarship in political science and public administration on co-production in the mid-2000s—and beyond. Surge Co-production as an approach to public service delivery quickly galvanised and generated research by scholars in political science and public administration. Brudney (2020) documents the publication of more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in the late 1970s through the 1980s, including in highly regarded journals such as Public Administration Review and Administration and Society (The enumeration would be substantially longer but does not incorporate the many conference and workshop papers on co-production). Yet, just as this surge had begun to take hold, it seemed to come to an abrupt halt in the 1990s. Several interconnected factors offer a possible explanation. Decline As in the trajectory of most academic trends, no one influence is completely responsible for the decline in co-production research during the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Instead, a series of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors helped to draw co-production research away from political science and public administration, only to find a new home in other fields or areas. The primary push was the ascendancy of the New Public Management as the dominant approach in public administration. The primary pulls consisted of the development of new frames for the examination of co-production, the receptivity of other fields (and journals) to publication of co-production research, and the advent of university centres and programmes to house co-production scholars (Brudney 2020). Research on co-production may have stalled, but it did not end. New Public Management. Thomas (2013) elaborates the roles that public managers may ascribe to the populace as citizens, customers and partners. As he points out, these preconceptions affect the ways that public administrators conceive, and ultimately interact with, the public. The 1990s witnessed the New Public Management approach taking centre stage as the dominant perspective in public administration. With it came a pronounced emphasis on viewing the public not as partners as in the coproduction approach, but as customers: As Thomas (2013, 787–788) explains, ‘Thinking about the public as customers of government developed as part of another wave of public administration reform in the 1990s … this next wave

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focused on improving governmental performance principally by subjecting governments to more market competition. As one aspect of the market focus, governments were advised to view their publics as customers and to aim for “customer-driven government”’, a classic phrase adopted from Osborne and Gaebler (1993). ‘The New Public Management (NPM), as the movement became known, exerted an enormous influence on the practice of public administration’, including a 1993 presidential executive order (no. 12862) in the United States encouraging all federal agencies to establish standards for customer service as well as measures in other countries (Thomas 2013, 788). This conception of the populace as customers rather than as partners in New Public Management likely distracted, if not deterred, scholarly attention from the co-production of services in the 1990s. As opposed to the evaluation and consumption roles that New Public Management seemed to envision for the public, co-production embraced greater participation of citizens in the design and delivery of the services they received. In addition, if improving governmental performance by subjecting public agencies to market competition is the goal, greater citizen involvement through co-production is likely not the means. To the contrary, early studies showed that paid service agents may prefer government-centred service delivery to co-production not only because of their adherence to established routines but also, the new perspectives, insights and labour that citizen co-producers might bring to services notwithstanding, citizen participation can be cumbersome, time-consuming and subject to abuses (for example, Rosentraub and Sharp 1981; Rosentraub and Warren 1987; Sharp 1980). Ironically, more contemporary research conceives of citizens co-creating value with paid public service agents through such activities (Farr 2016; Dudau et al. 2019; Torfing et al. 2019). Given the predominance of New Public Management, however, co-production could not be confused with an NPM service delivery strategy intended to yield enhanced market competition or position. In sum, the co-production model did not comport well with the foundations of New Public Management. Nabatchi et al. (2017) note that one of the unintended consequences of the problems associated with the New Public Management reforms is that they inadvertently helped to give rise to renewed scholarly and practitioner interest in co-production. Indeed, the resurgence of scholarship on co-production in political science and public administration began at almost the same time that Dunleavy et al. (2006) proclaimed, ‘New public management is dead’. While NPM was still very much alive to dominate the public administration literature in the 1990s, though, it pushed co-production scholars to seek other outlets for publication and dissemination. Research on volunteer involvement in the delivery of government services. One outlet was scholarship examining the involvement of citizen volunteers in the delivery of a range of government services. Writing at the height of the first wave of interest in co-production among scholars in political science and public administration, Brudney (1990, 19) recognised the roots of his study on organised citizen volunteer programs in government in this literature:

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‘The burgeoning research on co-production has brought needed attention to a set of innovative options open to governments for the delivery of goods and services. Only infrequently, however, has this scholarship fixed on the challenges and opportunities raised by the involvement of service volunteers in the public sector’ (cf. Brudney 1993). Brudney’s (1990) Fostering Volunteer Programs in the Public Sector attempted to fill this gap. In the late 1980s and early 1990s other public administration researchers addressed this theme through their examination of volunteer involvement in the delivery of various government services, such as libraries (Walter 1987, 1993), personnel agencies (Seigel 1983), police departments (Sundeen and Siegel 1986, 1987; Siegel and Sundeen 1986) and emergency medical services (Norris et al. 1993). Survey research also explored volunteer participation in local government more generally (Ferris 1988; Sundeen 1988; Duncombe 1985, 1986), and a series of surveys by the International CityCounty Management Association (ICMA) documented the use of citizen volunteers as a service delivery option. Although the literature debates the appropriate place of volunteer involvement in studies and definitions of coproduction (please see below), this lineage continues: In their recent article Musso et al. (2019) conceive ‘volunteerism as co-production in public service management’. Interdisciplinary research on citizen involvement. Interest in co-production was (is) not limited to political science and public administration. Academic journals receptive to an interdisciplinary focus on citizen participation and new non-profit journals emerging in the 1990s offered attractive outlets for coproduction research. Co-production research may have declined in disciplinary journals in public administration in the 1990s, but it found new life in these other outlets. Perhaps the most prominent example is the Journal of Voluntary Action Research (JVAR) and its successor Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ), which occupies the top rank of non-profit journals according to its impact factor. In the inaugural issue of JVAR Editor David Horton Smith wrote, ‘This is the first issue of a scholarly journal representing a new intellectual endeavor – an attempt by people with a serious intellectual interest in some aspects of the various forms of voluntary action to develop an interdisciplinary, interprofessional, and international forum for their research, theory, and policy thinking’ (Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 1972). In 1990 JVAR became NVSQ to acknowledge formally what had already transpired in its printed pages: a commitment to examining the status, role and activities of the non-profit sector. The Journal of Voluntary Action Research/Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly proved very open to research on co-production. Based on an exhaustive literature review of all articles published in the journal over the first 20 years (volumes) of its existence, 1972–1991, Brudney and Durden (1993) found that co-production was the eleventh most common topic treated in the journal, accounting for 3.4% of all articles published. (The topic researched

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most frequently was motivation of volunteers, in 9.6% of articles). Their analysis showed that coverage of co-production had risen since the first decade of journal publication (1972–1981), a fairer assessment of scholarly interest given that co-production did not achieve currency until the 1980s. From 1982 through 1986, 4.6% of the articles published in the journal treated co-production, and in 1987–1991, the final period for which Brudney and Durden (1993) analysed articles in the journal, 4.4% had a co-production focus. Interest in co-production in disciplinary public administration journals may have waned in the 1990s, but new interdisciplinary journals treating the variety of citizen participation and interaction with government provided a welcome outlet for interested scholars. The rise of academic interest and programs in non-profit studies. The last major ‘pull’ accounting for the decline of scholarly interest in co-production away from political science and public administration in the 1990s and early 2000s was the concomitant development and proliferation of scholarship, academic programmes and research centers in non-profit studies. Nascent in the 1980s, this development was in full swing by the 1990s (O’Neill and Fletcher 1998), as evidenced by the founding of the Nonprofit Academic Centers Council (NACC), the peak association dedicated to promotion and networking of centers providing research and education in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, in 1991. Thus, scholars of co-production were afforded an institutional home outside of political science and public administration. Even as mainstream public administration adopted New Public Management in the 1990s (Thomas 2013)—which tended to ‘push’ away coproduction research—the new non-profit academic programmes siphoned interest in co-production. New academic foci required new publication outlets: The year 1990 witnessed not only the re-launch of the Journal of Voluntary Action Research as Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly but also the inauguration of the highly rated journals Nonprofit Management and Leadership (second-highest impact factor in the field) and Voluntas (third-highest IF). The rise of non-profit academic programmes and outlets for research provided a needed home, academic legitimacy and scholarly networks for public administration scholars with an interest in co-production. As if the push from New Public Management were not sufficient to lure co-production scholarship away from public administration in the 1990s–early 2000s, several other factors offered pulls, including new lenses for examining co-production, such as studies of government-based volunteer programmes, new publication outlets and new institutional homes. Co-production research declined in political science and public administration over this period, but it continued in other venues. The mid-2000s and beyond have witnessed a resurgence of interest in co-production in these fields.

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Extending the Co-production Concept One cannot date (or explain) with certainty when the resurgence of interest in co-production began in political science and public administration. For example, Ostrom (1996) published a highly-cited article on the topic in 1996. But in the mid-2000s the prospects for renewal were certainly better than they had been for the past decade and a half: According to Dunleavy et al. (2006) the demise of New Public Management, the primary push factor, was at hand, and the pull factors had gathered momentum. This period turned out to be propitious for a reemergence of interest among scholars in co-production. Although research on co-production often alludes to possible cost-savings, and fiscal stress is an endemic concern in the public sector, the renewed interest predates the worldwide economic recession in 2007–2008. One indicator of the renewal is the flurry of articles in the mid-2000s lamenting the imprecision of the co-production concept and, in turn, seeking to define, re-define, refine, or extend it. Brudney and England (1983) had progressed ‘toward a definition of the co-production concept’ almost immediately after Parks et al. (1981) publication, but this effort began in earnest some 20 years later (Nabatchi et al. 2017; Alford 2014). Parks et al. (1981) had proposed a rather straightforward, yet profound, formulation; Alford (2014, 313) describes it as ‘disarmingly simple’, and Aligica (2016, 46S) as ‘rather simple and intuitive:’ Parks et al. (1981) conceived co-production as the mixing of the productive efforts of government service agents, regular producers, and citizen consumer–producers, who assisted them in the delivery of services. Thus, these authors foresaw co-production as occurring between government and recipients or users of the services. As expressed by Brudney and England (1983, 64), ‘Conceptually, co-production challenges the traditional service delivery model in which municipal government (regular producers) provides goods and services to a largely passive, consuming citizenry. Instead, co-production requires a “critical mix” of regular producer and consumer (citizen) activities’. Figure 3.1 depicts this initial conceptualisation. The figure shows the rather modest (shaded) area of shared or overlapping activity between regular producers in government and citizen consumers that

Fig. 3.1 Initial co-production model (Source Brudney and England [1983])

Regular Producers

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would qualify as co-production in the initial conceptualisation (Parks et al. 1981; Brudney and England 1983). Later conceptualisations of co-production have expanded this formulation in two primary ways that render co-production more relevant and important in political science and public administration, by explicating: (1) the participants involved in the co-production process, and (2) the phases or stages of the service cycle included in co-production. Participants in Co-production First, the actors who can and do engage in co-production on both sides of the service production ‘equation’ have increased dramatically. Brudney and England (1983, 64) had argued that on the citizen side, co-production was not limited to the small group of citizen consumer–producer recipients/users, but that both the participants and the beneficiaries in the co-production of services extended beyond their ranks. They identified three levels of citizen coproduction: individual, much like the consumer–producers described above; group, including neighbourhood associations and organisations; and collective, in which ‘co-productive activities result in collective goods whose benefits may be enjoyed by the entire community’, rather than consumer– producers exclusively. Their formulation included citizen volunteers as part of the co-production mix and anticipated that the amount of co-production would increase at successive levels of their typology, so that in collective coproduction ‘the degree of overlap achieved between these two spheres [in Figure 3.1] – the extent of co-production – is substantial’. The idea that co-production extended to citizen volunteers as participants in public service delivery was rapidly assimilated by other scholars (for example, Ferris 1988) and continues (Musso et al. 2019). In an article elaborating co-production further, Bovaird (2007) identified ‘the range of user and community co-production roles in local public services’ (p. 846). With respect to citizens he included as co-producers ‘service users or other members of the community, where all parties make substantial resource contributions’ (p. 847). Bovaird focused on ‘users, volunteers, and community groups as co-producers’, but his detailed examination of case studies and examples illustrated and recognised even greater breadth and variety of coproduction participants, roles and processes. Alford (2014, 301–302) uses this basis as the point of departure for his treatment of co-production: ‘The early formulation confined the definition of who co-produces to consumers, thereby seeming to rule out a co-productive role for other actors, such as citizens, volunteers, or non-governmental partners. But as Bovaird (2007) and others spell out, it is now well established that co-production can be performed by other types of actors as well …. It is therefore obvious that co-production is not confined to consumers; it may also involve various other types of people’ (emphasis in the original). Sancino (2016) presents an elaborate co-production model encompassing the involvement of community organisations, clients, citizens, consumers, volunteers and others.

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Thus, definitions of co-production have expanded the range of citizen participants in co-production. They have also increased the ranks of the regular producers. Parks et al. (1981) had in mind as regular producers government service agents (Bovaird 2007; Alford 2014). Ensuing definitions have embraced a broader conceptualisation to include as regular producers not only government but also other professionalised service providers ‘in any sector’ (Bovaird 2007, 847). Brudney and England (1983) had alluded to this prospect but were not as explicit. A Symposium published in the journal Public Management Review recognises and celebrates the involvement of the third sector as well as the public sector in the co-production of services (Brandsen and Pestoff 2006; see also Pestoff and Brandsen 2008). Benjamin and Brudney (2018) discuss the long involvement of the nonprofit sector in co-production and elucidate ‘what … voluntary sector studies offer research on co-production’. Aligica (2016) and Aligica and Tarko (2013) discuss the theoretical underpinnings of co-production in the non-profit sector (see also Mazzei et al. 2019). Phases or Stages of the Service Cycle Included in Co-production As shown in Fig. 3.1 initial formulations conceived of the process of coproduction as occurring in the delivery or implementation stage of public service delivery. Succeeding definitions have extended this dimension of co-production significantly. Bovaird (2007) proposed that the concept of co-production includes service planning as well as delivery and, in fact, ‘is not only relevant to the service delivery phase of services management (where it was first discovered in the 1970s) but also can extend across the full value chain of service planning, design, commissioning, managing, delivering, monitoring, and evaluation activities’ (2007, 847; cf. Alford 2014). Bovaird and Loeffler (2012, 2015) detail that co-commissioning of services includes co-planning of policy and co-prioritisation of services, and co-financing services; co-delivery embraces co-managing services and co-performing services; and co-assessment includes co-monitoring and co-evaluation of services. In another statement of definition, Brandsen and Honingh (2016) focus on the extent to which citizens are involved not only in the implementation but also in the design of professionally produced services. Representing 36 member countries, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2011, 32) defines co-production as ‘A way of planning, designing, delivering and evaluating public services which draws on direct input from citizens, service users and civil society organisations’. Similarly, Nabatchi et al. (2017) conceive of co-production occurring in the four major phases of the service cycle: cocommissioning, co-designing, co-delivery and co-assessment, a typology first elaborated in Bovaird and Loeffler (2013).

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A Resurgence of Interest: Co-production in Political Science and Public Administration Despite the attention devoted to conceptual development over the past decade and a half—a systematic review of the co-creation/co-production literature conducted by Voorberg et al. (2015) established that in nearly one in five articles (18%) the study results were concerned with identification of different types of co-creation/co-production—not all scholars agree conceptually or empirically on how to define, or operationalise, the co-production concept, or whether further efforts at conceptualisation are necessary or worthwhile. Based on their systematic review of 122 articles and books on co-creation/coproduction from the period 1987–2013, Voorberg et al. (2015) determined that ‘we can conclude that empirically co-creation and co-production are used as interchangeable concepts. However, the question can be raised whether this supports the creation of conceptual clarity’ (Voorberg et al. 2015, 1340). Nevertheless, contemporary treatments (and definitions) of the concept have extended the range not only of consumer (citizen) producers and regular (organisation) producers engaged in co-production, but also the phases of the service cycle in which they are involved. Figure 3.2 summarises the contemporary co-production model.

Co-Assessment Co-Design Co-Commissioning Co-Delivery

Regular Producers

Fig. 3.2 Contemporary co-production model

Consumers

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Comparison of Figs. 3.1 and 3.2 elucidates the conceptual trajectory of the co-production concept. Figure 3.1 shows the initial co-production model (Parks et al. 1981) as depicted by Brudney and England (1983). The shaded area of overlap in the figure shows the comparatively limited sphere in which government regular producers join with citizen consumer–producers to (co)produce public services that the latter receive or otherwise derive benefit. Figure 3.2 begins with that initial co-production model at its centre or core (as illustrated in Fig. 3.1) and shows how the contemporary co-production model has expanded its breadth, reach—and richness. First, on the consumer (citizen) side, in the contemporary model consumer–producers expand from the direct service beneficiaries in Fig. 3.1 to encompass individuals, groups and collectivities involved in some way in the co-production of services. Second, on the regular producer side, co-producers entail not only public agencies as initially conceived but also non-profit organisations and other organisations involved in the co-production of services. Third, the phases of the service cycle in which co-production occurs radiate around co-delivery, the sole phase in the initial co-production model, to include the preceding service phases of co-commissioning and codesign, and the subsequent phase of co-assessment. Consequently, as shown in Fig. 3.2, the shaded area representing co-production of services in the contemporary model has grown substantially from the modest overlapping of (government) regular producers and service-consuming citizens participating in service (co)delivery (cf. Fig. 3.1) to a more robust conceptualisation that has expanded vertically to capture the full range of actors involved in services and horizontally to encompass their involvement in all phases of the service cycle. Given that the contemporary co-production model emphasizes citizen involvement but otherwise resembles a governance approach to services featuring multiple public and private actors, groups and organisations at different levels involved in multiple stages of the service cycle, the renewed interest in co-production among scholars in political science and public administration is understandable. This model has become central to the study of public services in these fields and allows scholars to conceptualize important questions regarding co-production. Co-production scholars have examined a broad range of issues, including: the goals or outcomes of co-production, such as increasing service effectiveness, efficiency, citizen involvement, satisfaction, democracy and social cohesion; the factors influencing organisational participation in co-production, such as the compatibility of public organisations with citizen participation, attitudes toward citizen involvement, the administrative culture, and incentives for agency participation; and the factors influencing citizen participation, such as citizen characteristics and motivations, awareness, social capital and risk aversion (Voorberg et al. 2015). In addition, equity in the production and distribution of public services has long been a preoccupation of co-production researchers (Steen et al. 2018). Other research shows the growing relevance of co-production to scholars of political science and public administration. For example, Eriksson (2019)

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broadens the approach to incorporate the varying roles and consequences of representation of citizen groups at different stages of co-production. ‘Representative co-production’ is the result: ‘The joint and voluntary involvement of group representatives in evaluating, designing, and delivering public services that enable value co-creation for other group members’ (Eriksson 2019, 298). In studies of ‘representative bureaucracy’, Riccucci and Van Ryzin (2017) and Riccucci et al. (2016) review and explore the linkage between the level of co-production achieved and the representation of client groups in government agencies through the employment of public officials who have similar demographic characteristics as clients. They find that such passive or symbolic representation of clients can produce greater trust in government agencies and increased willingness to co-produce public services. Some scholars of political science and public administration go farther. Dudau et al. (2019) elevate co-production from a ‘concept’, as in earlier research, to a ‘co-paradigm’ for political science and public administration encompassing co-design, co-production and value co-creation of public services. They propose a research agenda for co-production focusing on basic, yet largely unanswered questions, such as the forms and results that co-production may have in service delivery, the range of application of the coparadigm across different types of services, the antecedents and consequences of co-production, and the effect of technology and other workplace innovations on co-production (Dudau et al. 2019, 1590). Other authors likewise embrace a paradigmatic view of co-production. Torfing et al. (2019) conceive co-creation as ‘A New Public Administration Paradigm’ (p. 797) and observe (p. 798), ‘in some countries, co-creation is increasingly perceived as a new public administration paradigm as it involves a whole new thinking about public service delivery and policy development’. These authors propose eight propositions to guide further research on the co-paradigm (pp. 818–819). At the same time that Dudau et al. (2019) and Torfing et al. (2019) are expansive in their vision of a co-paradigm, they are cautious that researchers and practitioners do not accept it uncritically but urge them to evaluate its tenets rigorously. This process of constructive disenchantment or demystification (Dudau et al. 2019) should lead not only to identifying challenges to the co-paradigm—such as the threat of ‘co-contamination’ or the failure to attain public value in co-production processes (Williams et al. 2016)—but also a more solid empirical foundation to guide further study and action. Osborne et al. (2016) warn that co-production may not only lead to co-creation of value but also co-destruction, and that this issue has been largely overlooked in theoretical and policy and practice discourses about co-production of public services (cf. Steen et al. 2018). In addition, scholars of political science and public administration have employed a co-production framework to address profound questions of theory and design principles in their disciplines. For example, Aligica and Tarko (2013) present a conceptual model that explains how co-production can be used to understand and treat complex problems in collective action, the

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creation of public goods, and the protection of common-pool resources (cf. Aligica 2016). They find that co-production is related to the concept of ‘polycentricity’, in which citizens may enjoy opportunities to participate in the production of various goods and services in multiple, competing and overlapping centres of power and authority at different geographical scales: ‘People with different values and perspectives, once allowed the freedom, gather and cooperate in particular co-production processes for the provision of public goods at different levels and in different circumstances’ (Aligica and Tarko 2013, 737). Thus, co-production can take different forms at different levels of aggregation. Scholars address issues of institutional design in the ‘public economy’ of service production that might be more or less conducive to co-production or to particular types of co-production (Alford 2014). Co-production is not only a theoretical construct but also, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2011), a practical reality helping to guide governance practices among member states. For example, through analysis of case studies in developing countries (Brazil and Nigeria) Ostrom (1996) demonstrates the importance of the encouragement by public officials of citizen inputs to the service production process for the level of public goods attained. Joshi and Moore (2004) find that although empirical estimates are weak, institutionalised co-production arrangements appear to be widespread in poorer countries.

Conclusion: Co-production in Political Science and Public Administration I began this chapter by noting the inability to explain how and why a concept—co-production—will come in and out of interest in the social sciences only to remerge with even more adherents and possible applications. The explanation afforded by this chapter indicates a modest re-interpretation of this apparent trend: Tracing the attention devoted to co-production since its inception in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the analysis suggests that attention to co-production, indeed, receded as New Public Management took centre stage in public administration in the 1990s, but that interest persisted in new guises and new homes, finding support among scholars pursuing volunteer involvement in the delivery of government services, interdisciplinary research on citizen involvement, and academic programs in nonprofit studies. As attention to co-production resurfaced in the mid-2000s scholars enlarged and enhanced the concept, with respect to both the regular producers and consumer–producers involved and the phases of the service cycle in which their involvement might take place. Other scholarship takes an even more expansive view of co-creation/co-production as an approach in political science and pubic administration. The trajectory has not been linear, but the result highly useful for scholars and practitioners in political science and public administration. ‘Sometimes the wrong train can take us to the right place’.

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References Alford, J. (2014). The Multiple Facets of Co-production: Building on the Work of Elinor Ostrom. Public Management Review, 16(3), 299–316. Aligica, P.D. (2016). Neither Market nor Sate Domain: Nonprofits from the Ostroms’ Theoretical Perspective. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 45(4 Supplement), 43S–60S. Aligica, P.D., & Tarko, V. (2013). Co-production, Polycentricity, and Value Heterogeneity: the Ostroms’ Public Choice Institutionalism Revisited. American Political Science Review, 107(4), 726–741. Benjamin, L.M., & Brudney, J.L. (2018). What Do Voluntary Sector Studies Offer Research on Co-Production? In Taco Brandsen, Trui Steen, & Bram Verschuere (eds.), Co-production and Co-creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services (pp. 49– 60). New York: Routledge. Bovaird, T. (2007). Beyond Engagement and Participation: User and Community Coproduction of Public Services. Public Administration Review, 67(5), 846–860. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2012). From Engagement to Co-production: The Contribution of Users and Communities to Outcomes and Public Value. Voluntas, 23(4), 1119–1138. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2013). We’re All in This Together: Harnessing User and Community Co-production of Public Outcomes. In C. Staite (ed.), Making Sense of the Future: Do We Need a New Model of Public Services? Birmingham: INLOGOV. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2015). Coproducing Public Services with Service Users, Communities, and the Third Sector. In Perry, J.L., & Christensen, R.K. (ed.), Handbook of Public Administration 3rd ed. (pp. 235–250). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M.E. (2016). Distinguishing Different Types of Coproduction: A Conceptual Analysis Based on the Classical Definitions. Public Administration Review, 76(3), 427–435. Brandsen, T., & Pestoff, V., (2006). Co-production, the Third sector and the Delivery of Public Services. Public Management Review, 8(4), 493–501. Brudney, J.L. (1990). Fostering Volunteer Programs in the Public Sector: Planning, Initiating, and Managing Voluntary Activities. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Brudney, J.L. (1993). Introduction to the Symposium: Volunteers in the Delivery of Public Services. Public Productivity and Management Review, 16(3), 255–256. Brudney, J.L. (2020). Rethinking Coproduction: Amplifying Involvement and Effectiveness. Journal of Chinese Governance, 5(1), 8–27. Brudney, J.L., & Durden, T.K. (1993). Twenty Years of the Journal of Voluntary Action Research/Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly: An Assessment of Past Trends and Future Directions. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 22(3), 207–218. Brudney, J.L., & England, R.E. (1983). Toward a Definition of the Coproduction Concept. Public Administration Review, 43(1), 59–65. Dudau, A., Glennon, R., & Verschuere, B. (2019). Following the Yellow Brick Road? (Dis)Enchantment with Co-design, Co-production and Value Co-creation in Public Services. Public Management Review, 21(11), 1577–1594. Duncombe, S. (1985). Volunteers in City Government: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Uses. National Civic Review, 74(9), 356–364.

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Duncombe, S. (1986). Volunteers in City Government: Getting More Than Your Money’s Worth. National Civic Review, 75(5), 291–301. Dunleavy, P., Margetts, H., Bastow, S., & Tinkler, J. (2006). New Public Management Is Dead-Long Live Digital-era Governance. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 16, (3), 467–494. Eriksson, Erik M. (2019). Representative Co-production: Broadening the Scope of the Public Service Logic. Public Management Review, 21(2), 291–314. Farr, M. (2016). Co-production and Value Co-creation in Outcome-Based Contracting in Public Services. Public Management Review, 18(5), 654–672. Ferris, J.M. (1988). The Use of Volunteers in Public Service Production: Some Demand and Supply Considerations. Social Science Quarterly, 69(1), 3–23. Fuchs, V. (1968). The Service Economy. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research. Garn, H., Flax, M., Springer, M., & Taylor, J. (1976). Models for Indicator Development: A Framework for Policy Analysis. Urban Institute Paper 1206-17. Washington, DC: Urban Institute. Gersuny, C., & Rosengren, W. (1973). The Service Society. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. Joshi, A., & Moore, M. (2004). Institutionalised Co-production: Unorthodox Public Service Delivery in Challenging Environments. Journal of Development Studies, 40(4), 31–49. Kiser, L., & Percy, S. (1980). The Concept of Coproduction and Its Prospects for Public Service Delivery. Working Paper No. W80-6, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. Mazzei, M., Teasdale, S., Calò, F., & Roy, M.J. (2019). Coproduction and the Third Sector: Conceptualising Different Approaches to Service User Involvement. Public Management Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2019.1630135. Musso, J.A., Young, M.M., & Thom, M. (2019). Volunteerism as Co-production in Public Service Management: Application to Public Safety in California. Public Management Review, 21(4), 473–494. Nabatchi, T., Sancino, A., & Sicilia, M. (2017). Varieties of Participation in Public Services: the Who, When, and What of Coproduction. Public Administration Review, 77(5), 766–776. Nonprofit Academic Centers Council. (2019). About NACC. http://www.nonprofitacademic-centers-council.org/. Accessed 10 Jan 2019. Norris, D.F., Mandell, M.B., & Hathaway, W.E. (1993). Volunteers in Emergency Medical Service: A Case Study from Rural America. Public Productivity & Management Review, 16(3), 257–269. O’Neill, M., & Fletcher, K. (1998). Nonprofit Management Education: U.S. and World Perspectives. Westport, CT: Greenwood/Praeger. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2011). Together for Better Public Services: Partnering with Citizens and Civil Society. Paris: OECD Public Governance Reviews. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecdilibrary. org/governance/together-for-better-public-services-partnering-with-citizens-andcivil-society_9789264118843-en. Accessed 24 Feb 2020. Osborne, D., & Gaebler, T. (1993). Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector. New York: Penguin. Osborne, S. P., Radnor, Z., & Strokosch, K. (2016). Co-production and the Co-creation of Value in Public Services: A Suitable Case for Treatment? Public Management Review, 18(5), 639–653.

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Ostrom, Elinor. (1996). Crossing the Great Divide: Coproduction, Synergy, and Development. World Development, 24(6), 1073–1087. Ostrom, V., & Ostrom, E. (1978). Public Goods and Public Choices. In E. Savas (ed.), Alternatives for Delivering Public Services: Toward Improved performance (pp. 7–49). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Parks, R.B., et al. (1981). Consumers as Coproducers of Public Services: Some Economic and Institutional Considerations. Policy Studies Journal, 9(7), 1001– 1011. Percy, Stephen L. (1978). Conceptualizing and Measuring Citizen Coproduction of Safety and Security. Policy Studies Journal, 7, 486–492. Percy, Stephen L. (1979). Citizen Coproduction of Community Safety. In R. Baker & F. A. Meyer, Jr. (eds.), Evaluating Alternative Law Enforcement Policies (pp. 125– 134). Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Pestoff, V., & T. Brandsen, eds. (2008). Co-production, the Third Sector and the Delivery of Public Services. London: Routledge. Riccucci, N.M., & Van Ryzin, G.G. (2017). Representative Bureaucracy: A Lever to Enhance Social Equity, Coproduction, and Democracy. Public Administration Review, 77(1), 21–30. Riccucci, N.M., Van Ryzin, G.G., & Li, H. (2016). Representative Bureaucracy and the Willingness to Coproduce: An Experimental Study. Public Administration Review, 76(1), 121–130. Rosentraub, M.S., & Sharp, E. (1981). Consumers as Producers of Social Services: Coproduction and the Level of Social Services. Southern Review of Public Administration, 4, 502–539. Rosentraub, M.S., & Warren, R. (1987). Citizen Participation in the Production of Urban Services. Public Productivity Review, 10(3), 75–89. Sancino, A. (2016). The Meta Co-production of Community Outcomes: Towards a Citizens’ Capabilities Approach. Voluntas, 27(1), 409–424. Seigel, G. B. (1983). Voluntarism in Local Government Central Personnel Agencies in California. Public Personnel Management Journal, 12, 129–145. Sharp, E.B. (1980). Toward a New Understanding of Urban Services and Citizen Participation: The Coproduction Concept. Midwest Review of Public Administration, 14(2), 105–118. Siegel, G.B., & Sundeen, R. A. (1986). Volunteering in Municipal Police Departments: Some Hypotheses on Performance Impacts. Public Productivity Review, 10, 77–91. Steen, T., Brandsen, T. & Verschuere, B. (2018). The Dark Side of Co-creation and Co-production: Seven Evils. In T. Brandsen, T. Steen, & B. Verschuere (eds.), Coproduction and Co-creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services (pp. 284–293). New York: Routledge. Sundeen, R.A. (1988). Explaining Participation in Coproduction: A Study of Volunteers. Social Science Quarterly, 69(3), 547–568. Sundeen, R. A., & Siegel, G. B. (1986). The Uses of Volunteers by Police. Journal of Police Science and Administration, 14(1), 49–61. Sundeen, R. A., & Siegel, G. B. (1987). The Community and Departmental Contexts of Volunteer Use by Police. Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 16(3), 43–53. Thomas, J. C. (2013). Citizen, Customer, Partner: Rethinking the Place of the Public in Public Management. Public Administration Review, 73(6), 786–796.

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Torfing, J., Sørensen, E., & Røiseland, A. (2019). Transforming the Public Sector into an Arena for CO-creation: Barriers, Drivers, Benefits, and Ways Forward. Administration and Society, 51(5), 795–825. Uzochukwu, K., & Thomas, J.C. (2018). Who Engages in the Coproduction of Local Public Services and Why? The Case of Atlanta, Georgia. Public Administration Review, 78(4), 514–526. Voorberg, W.H., Bekkers, V.J.J.M., & Tummers, L.G. (2015). A Systematic Review of Co-creation and Co-production: Embarking on the Social Innovation Journey. Public Management Review, 17(9), 1333–1357. Walter, V. (1987). Volunteers and Bureaucrats: Clarifying Roles and Creating Meaning. Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 16(3), 22–32. Walter, V.A. (1993). For All the Wrong Reasons? Implementing Volunteer Programs in Public Organizations. Public Productivity & Management Review, 16(3), 257– 269. Whitaker, G.P. (1980). Coproduction: Citizen Participation in Service Delivery. Public Administration Review, 40(3), 240–246. Williams, B.N., Kang, S.C., & Johnson, J. (2016). (Co)-Contamination as the Dark Side of Co-production: Public Value Failures in Co-production Processes. Public Management Review, 18(5), 692–717.

CHAPTER 4

The Political Economy Foundations of Co-production Peter M. Jackson

The formal analysis and empirical investigation of co-production has primarily been conducted by disciplines other than economics. This chapter seeks to use some concepts drawn from economics in order to provide fresh insights into co-production that might be of value to policy makers, the management of public services and of course researchers. The modern public sector is embedded in a landscape of networked organisations, which include many voluntary organisations. In the new public governance model, which embraces the complex interdependencies within networks (Bovaird 2005; Sancino 2010) public managers are seen as brokers and mediators (Jackson 2001). Relationships between public service organisations and other agencies within the network become of strategic significance and interest. These institutional details are, however, washed out of the typical economists’ abstract and nomothetic treatment of the public sector. Both the consumer and the producer, as strategic agents, are to all intents and purposes missing from public sector economics models. There are no active consumers and the bureaucracy that supplies public service output is usually treated as a ‘black box’ (Jackson 1982). The dominant public choice model of public service supply is that of Niskanen (1971), which is intended to demonstrate the efficiency gains that arise from competing bureaux. This is not really a model of public production but is instead a theory of bureaucratic decision-making that is devoid of institutional detail. On the consumer P. M. Jackson (B) University of Leicester, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_4

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side, those who finally consume the public services are treated as ‘voters’ or ‘citizens’ rather than as active consumers. The heterogeneous preferences of voters are collapsed onto a single collective choice decision, such that every consumer of the public service is a ‘quantity taker’. Animated consumers who have heterogeneous preferences will, however, seek out decentralised solutions which will move them closer to their preferred consumption bundle. Co-production makes a contribution to opening up the black box of public production and to animating the voices of the consumers of public services.

What Is Co-production (Co-P)? NESTA (2012) refers to Co-P as, ‘the most important revolution in public services since the Beveridge Report 1942’, but what is Co-P and why has it emerged as an organisational form for the production and delivery of some public services? Why do some individuals and organisations participate in Co-P activities? ‘What induces people to contribute time and effort to Coproduction?’ (Alford 2002, p. 33). Who benefits from Co-P; what does Co-P produce and for whom? What coordination problems face those who manage within a Co-P environment? Many of these questions have already been confronted in the extensive CoP literature. The novelty of this chapter is that an economist’s perspective is adopted to shed some new light upon existing answers. Co-production is not a new concept and references can be found to it in Whitaker (1980), Sharp (1980), and Brudney and England (1983). Any genealogy of the concept needs to recognise the work of Elinor Ostrom and the foundational contributions of Vincent Ostrom and the Bloomington School—see in particular Parks et al. (1981), and Ostrom (1972, 1996). Alford (1998, 2002) was one of the first to recognise the importance of Co-P and to provide a systematic treatment of the concept along with tests based on case studies. Other notable early contributions were made by Pestoff (2006, 2009), Bovaird (2007) and Needham (2007). Despite Co-P having been around for well over forty years the concept of Co-P is ambiguous and not well understood (Meijer 2014). Multiple definitions exist, each reflecting the particular author’s specific perspective. The logical foundations and consequences of Co-P are seldom stated let alone empirically tested and knowledge about Co-P is drawn mainly from case studies. In a recent excellent and perceptive overview of Co-P (Nabatchi et al. 2017) the authors argue that, ‘confusion about co-production remains… no clear and consistently used definition of co-production appears in the public administration literature’ (p. 766) … ‘Despite growing interest in coproduction, the concept remains muddled’ (p. 767)—see also Sicilia et al. (2016) and Eriksson (2019). One way of trying to finesse an identity for Co-P is to consider what it is not. A number of authors, including Bovaird (2007) have ruled out

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the following: representative democracy; collaboration; public–private partnerships; strategic alliances; community governance; citizen engagement and participation and social marketing. A useful starting point is to consider Ostrom’s (1996) definition: co-production is ~ ‘…the process through which inputs used to provide a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not in the same organization… Co-production implies that citizens can play an active role in producing public goods and services of consequence to them’ (p. 1073). The majority of other definitions are a variant of this. Loeffler (2016) provides a very useful discussion of the alternative definitions distilling their essences into the following, co-production is about, ‘relationships between citizens and professionals in a public sector context’ (p. 320)… ‘Co-production is about professionals and citizens making better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes or improved efficiency’ (p. 321). Clear as it might appear, this definition seems to focus on the individual acting as a citizen. But who is a citizen? It is an ambiguous concept. What about individuals acting in roles other than that of citizen? Should user or client involvement be included? In his definition, Bovaird (2007, p. 84) is more inclusive/and defines Co-P as, ‘the provision of services through regular long term relationships between professionalized service providers (in any sector) and service users or other members of the community, where all the parties make substantial resource contributions’. This is very similar to Alford’s (2002) position, ‘many government services simply cannot function without client co-production’. Co-production, therefore, involves a range of external stakeholders in the production and delivery of public services but for stakeholders to be included in the definition they must be active, their input must be of significance to the level of output and the quality of the public service, and their relationship with the delivery of the service must be regular and long term (see Loeffler 2016). Another important dimension to any definition of Co-P is the nature of the relationship between the co-producers. Bovaird and Loeffler (2010) have argued that the relationship must be regular and long term. In addition, it must be voluntary (i.e. non-contractual) and cooperative (see Brudney and England 1983, p. 63). These two features will be developed later. In contrast to the muted voice of the ‘consumer’ of public services in the public sector economics/public choice approach, users/clients involved in a Co-P relationship are active participants rather than passive recipients of services. They interact with professionals in the production and delivery of services and together they pool their assets (material and non-material— knowledge and expertise), resources and competences working through a set of cooperative coordinated activities. What activities constitute ‘production’ in Co-P? Economists normally encapsulate production activities into a production function which simply aggregates the inputs of labour, capital and technical knowledge and relates them to output. The details of the production process are, in this framework,

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a black box. Industrial economists such as Porter have done much to open up the black box of production. Porter’s concept of the ‘value chain’ sets out in process flow terms the various activities that add value to the inputs as they pass through the organisation to become final output. In the context of Co-P there are clearly many different points along the public sector organisation’s value chain where Co-P might take place. Authors such as Bovaird (2007), Bovaird and Loeffler (2010, 2012), and Sicilia et al. (2016) acknowledge this and provide a more fine-grained description of co-production to include: co-planning; co-commissioning; co-design; co-delivery; co-monitoring and co-evaluation. Others, Brandsen and Pestoff (2006) add, co-management and co-governance to the list. Thus, Co-P becomes a ‘heterogeneous umbrella concept’ (Verschuere et al. 2012) that captures a variety of different activities that create and add value in the production and delivery of public services. A distinction should be drawn between public service outputs in the normal use of the phrase and public service outcomes. Loeffler (2016) in her definition of Co-P frames it in terms of outcomes. Public service outputs are a means to an end. They are an intermediary stage in the process of producing outcomes, i.e. a particular state of the world which the consumer of public services values. This distinction is not a matter of semantics. It is outcomes that the consumer demands and the same level of public service output can be associated with different outcomes (states of the world) as will be demonstrated below. Following Loeffler (2016) and Nabatchi et al. (2017) the principles of Co-P can be summarised as • service users (consumers) are active rather than passive—service users have more than just needs they have assets and knowledge that are important in the production of public services • the relationship between elected politicians and professional producers and consumers is collaborative rather than paternalistic • focus is on the delivery of outcomes rather than ‘services’ • Co-P may be ‘substitutive’, i.e. replacing public sector inputs by inputs from users/clients or it may be ‘additive’, i.e. adding extra client/user inputs to professional inputs or introducing professional support to previous individual self-help or community help organisations • Co-P may be initiated by public service organisations or by clients/users. In addition to substitutability and additionality, the complementary nature of Co-P relationships needs to be made explicit and emphasised. While it is implicit in some of the literature, it needs to be foregrounded. Complementarity refers to a situation in which the various stakeholders in the Co-P relationship make better use of each others’ resources when they are combined compared to when they act independently. Consider a stakeholder (A) and a

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professional producer (B) then: V (A + B) > V (A) + V (B) In this formulation, the value produced by A and B working together cooperatively, V (A + B), is greater than the value of A’s activity plus the value of B’s activity (i.e. there is additionality). In order to obtain the greater value V (A + B) attention has to be given to the way in which A and B’s activities are coordinated and managed. The literature on Co-P is relatively silent about the issues of the management of the relationships. Failure to manage effectively will constrain severely the amount of value added and in some cases it might destroy value. Finally, a distinction is drawn between individual co-production (CoP(I)) and collective production (CoP(C)). This difference was made originally by Brudney and England (1983, pp. 63–64) and also by Alford (2002). ‘We ….define collective co-production as the joint action of citizens to support public services and achieve outcomes, while individual co-production covers these actions not jointly undertaken. Collective co-production can arise from either self-interest (e.g. of service clients, volunteers, or other involved citizens) or out of other motives, such as general altruism or specific concerns for particular groups or social causes, which lead citizens to value benefits experienced collectively’ (Bovaird et al. 2016, p. 5). This section has sought to clarify Co-P as the object of study. As it turns out it has multiple meanings but the distinction between Co-P(I) and Co-P(C) is a useful starting point to begin an analysis of the underlying foundations of co-production. The next section will analyse Co-P(C) and this will be followed by an analysis of Co-P(I).

Collective Co-production ‘No collective good can be obtained without group arrangements, coordination or organization’, Olson (1965, p. 46). A long-standing problem which philosophers have confronted down through the ages is, will egoists cooperate with one another? This tension between doing what is good for the individual and what is good for everyone (the collective) was the focus of much of the work of Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith. It is the kernel of the prisoner’s dilemma game. Robert Axelrod’s (1984) empirical study of the prisoner’s dilemma found that an iterated play of the game produced a dominant (efficient) solution to the question, under what conditions will egoists cooperate when there is no central authority to police their interaction? Axelrod found that playing a tit-for-tat strategy generated voluntary cooperation. Buchanan (2007) along with members of the Bloomington School see the various institutional forms in the world arising from the fact that individuals have the capacity to cooperate with each other in order to develop private arrangements (see also Buchanan and Tullock 1962). Collective co-production is one such

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an arrangement that arises from voluntary cooperation. There is no central authority that compels citizens/users to cooperate in a Co-P(C) relationship— it is purely voluntary. Individuals acting privately and voluntarily as citizens contribute to the delivery of services that have been provided collectively. This is a significant departure from the standard neoclassical welfare economics of Samuelson and Musgrave who tended to focus on a sharp distinction between public and private goods. CoP(C) is a blend of public and private provision for collective consumption. Why, Alford (2002) asked, do individuals voluntarily cooperate in CoP(C)? Life is not a simple zero sum game. There are opportunities for mutually rewarding situations. The norm of reciprocity involves self-interest, i.e. cooperation is not based purely on a concern for others or the welfare of the group as a whole. It is best to cooperate with someone who will reciprocate cooperation in the future. This means that the possibility of achieving stable mutual cooperation depends on the strong probability of continuing interaction. This insight from game theory provides an analytical foundation to the question why do citizens engage in CoP(C)? Also, appealing to altruistic or ‘other regarding’ preferences, while being sufficient, is not necessary to explain the emergence of cooperation—individuals acting from self-interest will cooperate. It also demonstrates that the stability of a CoP(C) arrangement requires long term (continuing) relationships—a point which is made frequently in the literature. Effective long term relationships involve mutuality. One modern approach to the economics of organisations views an organisation as a ‘nexus of contracts’ (Williamson 1975). Such contracts can be explicit, that is, they are written contracts and, therefore, relatively well defined. Or they can be implicit—a set of tacit understandings between the participants in the organisation. Implicit contracts are full of ambiguity. Both explicit and implicit contracts are incomplete, in the sense that not every possible contingency is written into or covered by the contract. The parties to any contractual relationship have reciprocal expectations with respect to roles, duties, responsibilities, obligations and accountabilities. There are also expectations about how value arising from the cooperation of the parties will be distributed. In the case of CoP(C) which is a form of organisation, the relationships between the parties is a long term set of commitments, which can be thought of as a ‘relational contract’. Mutuality facilitates relational contracts which are tacit and implicit. This frame raises a number of questions • what is the nature of these relational contracts in CoP(C)? • what are the expectations of the different parties and how are these expectations communicated? • how are these relationships managed and coordinated? • how are disputes resolved? • what are the accountabilities?

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These questions are dealt with in the next section. What does it take to form and establish a CoP(C) arrangement? Mutuality and reciprocity are important drivers but what are the private costs of entering into such an arrangement? The ‘transactions costs’ might simply be too great resulting in a failure of the CoP(C) to emerge. As Olson (1965) points out common interests and collective gains are necessary but not sufficient to explain group formation and maintenance. The emergent trajectory and pattern is driven from within the group and reflects the balance of costs and benefits associated with group membership. Individuals’ reactions to the costs and benefits are sensitive to the size of the group with small groups being favoured. This suggests the hypothesis that long run stable CoP(C) arrangements will be associated with small rather than large group size. Stability will be enhanced for homogeneous rather than heterogeneous groups.

Team Production Theory and CoP(C) The list of questions set out in the previous section focuses on fundamental questions regarding the organisation and management of CoP(C). During the 1990s the principal/agent perspective was central to economic debates about the control of public sector budgets (see Besley 2006; Breton and Wintrobe 1982; Jackson 1982; Le Grand 2003). Bureaucrats and other public service professionals were seen as agents acting on behalf of principals (the citizen/voter). Politicians in a representative democracy are also agents of the voters. Within public service organisations, as in any organisation, there is a complex web of nested principal/agent relationships (Tirole 1986). Principal/agent relationships arise from the asymmetrical distribution of information which give rise to economic rents. How these rents are distributed becomes a matter of concern. Much of this literature focuses upon the design of incentives to minimise opportunistic rent seeking behaviour and also shirking. Principal/agent relationships exist within CoP(C) but are not identified as such within the co-production literature. Does this mean they are assumed away or that they are of no significance? Either position is not tenable. These problems and the behaviours associated with them are a potential threat to the success of any team including that of CoP(C). Team production theory emphasises the mutual vulnerabilities of team members. Cooperative individuals expect to be able to find mutually acceptable and beneficial solutions regarding how to allocate tasks and divide up the rewards. If disputes arise then they will want to have in place resolution procedures that are ‘fair’. Insights into CoP(C) can be derived from team production theory which was originally formulated by Alchian and Demsetz (1972). A team production is defined as ‘production in which (1) several types of resources are used… (2) the product is not a sum of separable outputs of each cooperating resource… (3) not all resources used in team production belong to one person’ (Alchian and Demsetz 1972, p. 779). CoP(C) is a complex bundle of activities— co-commissioning; co-design; co-delivery; co-assessment, etc. Because the

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outcome from these activities is not separable it is difficult to decide upon who is responsible for which part of the final output (outcome). Also, which team member’s contribution is the more valuable and who is accountable for what? The nature of team production, as defined by Alchian and Demsetz, presents problems for the design of incentives but within teams there is scope for free riding, shirking and the pursuit of opportunistic behaviour. The literature on CoP(C) appears to ignore shirking, free riding and rent seeking (opportunistic) behaviours, which is surprising given that they must exist. It is important for future research to think about these issues. If shirking and rent seeking exist and are significant then it will be difficult to convince individuals to volunteer to join a CoP(C) arrangement and to make specific investments of their time, effort and resources to the joint enterprise. Alchian and Demetz’s solution was to appoint a monitor to check for shirking and to monitor input performance. But because of the nature of team production, each party’s involvement is difficult to monitor and manage. Couple this with tacit ‘contracts’ that are ambiguous and performance management within CoP(C) faces significant challenges. Rajan and Zingales (1998) argue that it is in individuals’ interests to create a hierarchy of authority that will eliminate shirking and rent seeking. ‘Team members (will) submit to hierarchy not for the hierarchies’ benefit but for their own’. This is reminiscent of Hobbes’ notion in Leviathan that individuals will be willing to submit themselves to a coercive monarch to avoid ‘warre of everyone against everyone’. Rajan and Zingales advocate the use of a ‘mediating hierarchy’ to deal with the incentive problems in teams. An example of a mediating hierarchy is a management board. What lessons for CoP(C) can be drawn from team production theory? • the design of incentives is challenging but important to ensure that volunteers will be willing to join CoP(C) and to cooperate • performance management of teams is challenging • a mediating hierarchy, such as a management board, has a role to balance the interests of the various constituents and to deal with the challenges of coordinating productive activities and disputes/conflict resolution • while inviting volunteers to participate in CoP(C) is important, it is more important to create a conducive environment that will encourage them to invest their resources in the venture over the long term • small CoP(C) teams, following Olson, are more likely to be successful in solving the team production problems than larger teams. This list is neither exhaustive nor prescriptive. It sets out areas that require future research.

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Individual Co-production CoP(I) John Alford (1998) was one of the earliest to emphasise individual coproduction—he refers to it as client co-production. This form of CoP emphasises the active role played by the clients/users of public services. In terms of the principal/agent relationship Alford cast the principal in an active rather than a passive role: ‘…in some types of public sector activity, value cannot be created or delivered unless the client actively contributes to its production. This is the phenomenon of client co-production’ (p. 130) … ‘client co-production is necessary both for the organization to achieve its purposes and for the client to receive value’. (p. 132) (Alford 1998)

Later, in 2002, Alford argued: …whether clients will co-produce is dependent upon their ability as well as their willingness to do so. (p. 50) (client) co-production will call for the mobilization of the ‘tacit knowledge’… of the clients to interact efficiently with the organization in conjoint activities. (p. 41)

These statements of Alford are full of rich insights, which are still to be developed. What Alford did was to acknowledge that it is not business firms or public sector bureaucracies that create value, which is then delivered to consumers. Rather, it is consumers who co-produce value—each consumer gives objects, goods and experiences a personalised meaning and hence a value which reflects the interaction of these meanings and experiences with the individual’s tastes and preferences (see also Alford 2016). All goods and services whether public or private sector are means to an end. Their purchase and consumption are not ends in themselves. Consider, for example, the purchase of a camera. The camera is a means to an end, i.e. the production of photographs. But the process of taking and producing photographs has associated with it many experiences and benefits. The actions, activities and involvements, which make up processes, deliver benefits to the consumer. In economics, and much of management, active verbs are missing while emphasis is placed on nouns. Whether or not the photograph is of a high quality (as judged by an external evaluator) doesn’t only depend on the camera, it also depends on conditions and context and upon the competencies and knowledge of the photographer. The camera and the photographer are entangled in the co-production of the photograph. The experience economy and the knowledge economy are intertwined. Much of the final experience, and hence value, is produced/created by the consumers themselves, but they need the knowledge to do so. Consider the difference in the value placed on a mobile phone by a consumer who understands the

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full range of the functionality of the phone compared to that of a consumer whose knowledge is limited to the basic functions. Someone who has a deep knowledge, understanding and appreciation of ballet or opera will probably place a much higher value on a performance compared to someone who does not. Collective co-production takes the co-production story up to the point of interaction with the client/user of the service as consumer. The voluntary cooperation of citizens and users in CoP(C) is an input, a resource in the production and delivery of the public service to the consumer. That is, CoP(C) refers to upstream activities in the public services value chain. It is the direct or primary consumers of the service who, along with the various service stakeholders and secondary consumers who place value on the outcome that they personally and privately experience. This valuation will vary from individual to individual depending upon their income levels and their tastes and preferences. Where do consumer preferences come from? The economist’s standard treatment assumes that tastes and preferences are exogenously determined, that is, they are pre-moulded and given. Consumers are, however, no longer thought of as individuals with stable, exogenous and homogeneous preferences. Instead, tastes and preferences are endogenous (Bowles 1998), fluid, flexible and homogeneous and emerge having been shaped by the consumer’s complex set of social interactions. Given the social context within which preferences are formed there is likely to be a variation in the demands for co-production from one local community to another. Osborne (2010) was the first to make a strong connection between public sector management, co-production and the service dominant logic of Normann (1991), Lusch and Vargo (2006) and Grönroos (2008). The central idea in this literature is that consumers co-create value. Co-creation was identified by Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000, 2004) and is linked closely to client co-production. ‘Suppliers do not deliver value to customers; they support customers’ value generating processes’ (Grönroos 2006, p. 400). Osborne’s (2018) most recent thinking now places a distance between his original adoption of the services dominant logic, which applies to private services, and what he now calls the ‘public service logic’. Co-creation assumes an intensive and dynamic relationship where value is created at the nexus of interaction. (Osborne 2018, p. 226)

The co-creating client is the subject of Ritzer’s (1993) study of the McDonaldisation of society. McDonald’s restaurants expect the customer to be engaged in the production process acting as unpaid waiters and cleaners. Banks use of ATMs make their customers unpaid bank tellers. In the context of public service co-production, what is the nature of the relationship between the client and the government (professional) provider of the service? Clearly it is not one of transactional exchange. The entangled consumer is part of the value creation process: the activities of consumers become acts of value creation. The distance

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between production and consumption is shrunk and collapses to a fixed point in time and space. The ontological gap between product and consumption dissolves. The object of study is not simply the producer/client relationship. It becomes, instead, an examination of specific practices of consumption. Many professionals see the consumer/client as an object to be managed and governed. Critics of these practices argue that the consumer/client is exploited and controlled by professionals in order to achieve the performance targets of the public service organisation. As a countervailing response, the post-modern consumer is cynical and reacts against technologies of control. To what extent are public service organisation clients empowered in practice? After all, this was one of the promised benefits of CoP. Do clients have sufficient influence to make producers do what they might not otherwise do? At the point of ‘consumption’ many public service clients are frequently vulnerable and dependent. They are not able to fight, negotiate or transform nor indeed engage directly in acts of co-creation. In such situations principal/agent type relationships dominate. Client co-production relationships are, therefore, more relevant to those situations for which clients are free to make a series of reasoned choices regarding how they will engage with the service. Client co-production and the co-creation literatures emphasise value in use. Consumers create their own value within a specific context. The consumer faces the value proposition presented by the service provider and either accepts it or rejects it. Having accepted it, the consumer then takes it and complements it with their own resources in order to customise the service and thereby create their own personalised experience and value. In Fig. 4.1, Q 2 is the collectively determined level of public output which each client/consumer takes as given, along with the fixed ‘price’ p 2 which

Fig. 4.1 Client co-production as reaction to fixed ‘public good’ offering

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satisfies the median voter. The combination (p 2 Q 2 ) satisfies no one other than the median voter and it, therefore, follows that there exists much allocative inefficiency. Individual 1 would prefer a lower offering Q 1 while individual 3 would prefer a higher offering Q 3 . One way in which individual 3 can move closer to her preferred position is to complement Q 2 with her own resources—this is client co-production and as such helps to minimise the allocative inefficiencies created by the fixed ‘public good’ nature of the public offering. What about individual 1? He is unable to vary Q 2 which is taken as given and he will be a strong advocate for a reduction in Q 2 . The value in use placed upon a public service can now be thought of as the value placed upon the bundle (Q 2 ; I i) where Q 2 is the public offering, as in Fig. 4.1, and I i is the input of own resources by individual i: Vi = v (Q 2 , Ii ) Where V i is the value that i places on the bundle (Q 2 , I i ). Whether the relationship between Q 2 and I i is linear or complementary is an open question. The total value of the public service (V ) is  V = Vi Finally, returning to Elinor Ostrom’s original analysis of co-production (Parks et al. 1981) and Ostrom (1996), many of the ideas set out in this chapter can be summarised along with insights that will form the basis of further research. These are set out in Fig. 4.2. The vertical axis shows levels of the public sector offering Q . The horizontal axis represents levels of client input (I ). The budget constraint (B) is the line C 1 C 2. B = pi Q + p2 I Where p 1 and p 2 are the implicit prices of the public offering (Q ) and the client input (I ), respectively. In the case of the client this implicit price is the opportunity cost of the client’s time and effort. The curve E is interpreted as an iso-effectiveness curve. Moving along E 1 an equal level of service effectiveness is achieved using different combinations of Q and I . Movements in a north east direction are associated with increases in effectiveness. Given the budget constraint C 1 C 2 the highest level of achievable effectiveness is E 1 and the optimal combination of public input and client input is shown as the point X, i.e. Q * I *. Note that Fig. 4.2 can be adapted for CoP(C). In that case the horizontal axis will refer to citizens’ inputs. If the government introduces an austerity policy of fiscal retrenchment, which reduces the public sector input by the amount B 1 C 2 , then the budget constraint shifts to B 1 C 2 . Given this new budget constraint B 1 B 2 the level of effectiveness falls to E 2 and the new optimal mix is Q 1 I 1 at the point Y .

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Fig. 4.2 Optimal mix of public input and client input

This represents a reduction in public expenditure from pQ * to pQ 1 . At this lower level of public sector clients can simply accept the situation and live with a lower level of service effectiveness or they can increase their input to I 2 in order to maintain the level of service effectiveness at E 1 corresponding to point Z . This analysis forces the research question—to what extent do clients from their own resources fill the gap left by austerity budget cuts? Is this a move towards a greater McDonaldisation of public services? Not every client has access to the personal resources to fill the gap—their incomes might be too low. They become constrained at Y . Austerity, therefore, has distributional consequences in a CoP world lying along the line YZ . A less charitable interpretation is that co-production gives government a licence to dump on users while claiming improvements in effectiveness!

Conclusions This chapter has examined collective co-production and individual (client) co-production within the formal framework of economic analysis. In doing so it has contributed to an understanding of the micro-foundations of coproduction. The chapter has demonstrated the value of returning to Ostrom’s

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(1996) original framework and has developed her analysis. Thinking about coproduction through the lens of collective choice and cooperative game theory emphasises the importance of group size and the homogeneity of preferences as influences upon the effectiveness of CoP relationships along with the structure of incentives derived from team based production theory. By looking at CoP as a solution to the allocative efficiency problem that faces the public sector the chapter has introduced a much needed rebalancing of the discussion of public sector efficiency and effectiveness. A number of questions have been raised and these will form the basis of future research, especially as CoP as an organisational form for the design and delivery of public services develops. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter that I received from Professor Michael Connolly; Professor Monica Franco-Santos and the editors. I take full responsibility for all remaining errors.

References Alchian, A., and Demsetz, H. (1972). Production, Information Costs and Economic Organization, American Economic Review, 66, 777–795. Alford, J. (1998). A Public Management Road Less Travelled: Clients as Co-Producers of Public Services, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 57(4), 128–137. Alford, J. (2002). Defining the Client in the Public Sector: A Social Exchange Perspective, Public Administration Review, 62(3), 337–346. Alford, J. (2016). Co-Production, Interdependencies and Publicness, Public Management Review, 18(5), 673–691. Axelrod, R. (1984). The Evolution of Co-Operation. New York: Basic Books. Besley, T. (2006). Principled Agents? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bovaird, T. (2005). Public Governance: Balancing Stakeholder Power in a Network Society, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 71(2), 217–228. Bovaird, T. (2007). Beyond Engagement and Participation: User and Community Coproduction of Public Services, Public Administration Review, 67(5), 846–860. Bovaird, T., and Loeffler, E. (2010). User and Community Co-Production of Public Services and Public Policies Through Collective Decision Making. In T. Brandsen and M. Holzer (eds), The Future of Governance. Newark, NJ: National Centre for Performance. Bovaird, T., and Loeffler, E. (2012). From Engagement to Co-Production: The Contribution of Users and Communities to Outcomes and Public Value. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Non-Profit Organizations, 23(4), 1119– 1138. Bovaird, T., Stoker, G., Jones, T., Loeffler, E., and Ronancio, M. (2016). Activating Collective Co-Production of Public Services: Influencing Citizens to Participate in Complex Governance Mechanisms in the UK, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 82(1), 47–68. Bowles, S. (1998). Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and Other Economic Institutions, Journal of Economic Literature, 36, 75–111. Breton, A., and Wintrobe, R. (1982). The Logic of Bureaucratic Conduct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Brudney, J. L., and England, R. E. (1983). Towards a Definition of the Co-Production Concept, Public Administration Review, 43(1), 59–65. Buchanan, J. M. (2007). Economics from the Outside In. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Buchanan, J. M., and Tullock, G. (1962). The Calculus of Consent. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eriksson, E. M. (2019). Representative Co-Production: Broadening the Scope of the Public Service Logic, Public Management Review, 21(2), 291–314. Grönroos, C. (2006). Adopting a Service Logic for Marketing, Marketing Theory, 6(3), 317–333. Grönroos, C. (2008). Service Logic Revisited: Who Creates Value and Who CoCreates? European Business Review, 20(4), 298–314. Jackson, P. M. (1982). The Political Economy of Bureaucracy. Oxford: Philip Allan. Jackson, P. M. (2001). Public Sector Added Value: Can Bureaucracy Deliver? Public Administration, 79(1), 5–28. Le Grand, J. (2003) Motivation, Agency and Public Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loeffler, E. (2016). Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes. In T. Bovaird and E. Loeffler (eds), Public Management and Governance (pp. 319–336). London: Routledge. Lusch, R. F., and Vargo, S. L. (2006). The Service Dominant Logic of Marketing. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Meijer, A. J. (2014). New Media and the Co-Production of Safety: An Empirical Analysis of Dutch Practices, The American Review of Public Administration, 44(1), 17–34. Nabatchi, T., Sicilia, M., and Sancino, A. (2017). Varieties of Participation in Public Services: The Who, When and What of Co-Production, Public Administration Review, 77(5), 766–776. Needham, C. (2007). Realizing the Potential of Co-Production: Negotiating Improvements in Public Services, Social Policy and Society, 7(2), 221–231. NESTA. (2012). People Powered Health Coproduction Catalogue. London: NESTA. Niskanen, W. A. (1971). A Reflection on Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Chicago: Aldine. Normann, R. (1991). Service Management-Strategy and Leadership in Service Business. Chichester: Wiley. Olson, M. (1965). The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Osborne, S. P. (2010). Delivering Public Services: Time for a New Theory? Public Management Review, 12(1), 1–10. Osborne, S. P. (2018) From Public Service-Dominant Logic to Public Service Logic: Are Public Service Organizations Capable of Co-Production and Value Co-Creation? Public Management Review, 20(2), 225–231. Ostrom, E. (1972). Metropolitan Reform: Propositions Derived from Two Traditions, Social Science Quarterly, 53, December, 474–493. Ostrom, E. (1996). Crossing the Great Divide: Co-Production, Synergy and Development, World Development, 24(6), 1073–1087. Parks, R., Baker, P. C., Kiser, L., Oakerson, R., Ostrom, E., Ostrom, V., Percy, S. L. (1981). Consumers as Co-Producers of Public Services: Some Economic and Institutional Considerations, Policy Studies Journal, 7, 486–492.

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CHAPTER 5

How to Work More Inclusively with ‘The People It’s About’ to Foster More Inclusive Outcomes: A Behavioural Insight and Behavioural Design Perspective on Co-production Tinna C. Nielsen Hidden Barriers to Inclusive Co-production The very essence of successful co-production is to include the people it’s about to view an issue from as many diverse perspectives as possible and apply as many insights as possible to co-produce better solutions and approaches for the people/community, the institution/organisation and the employees/service providers. My main argument is that this requires an inclusive co-production process, but inherent in ‘inclusive’ are some key challenges for user and community co-production caused by the human mind. Psychological and anthropological perspectives can help us understand these hidden barriers, as well as how to strengthen co-production by applying behavioural insights and behavioural design. This chapter describes a change methodology for inclusive co-production based on applying behavioural insights and behavioural design, that has evolved from my work as a global change maker and facilitator of collaborative innovation with groups such as citizens/residents, service users and providers, employees, managers/leaders, and social entrepreneurs. I work in private and public organisations, NGO’s, the United Nations, refugee camps, social housing areas, as well as being a social entrepreneur in Denmark. The focus of my work is inclusive development processes as a means to foster inclusive communities, workplaces, cities, public policies, and societies. The T. C. Nielsen (B) Danish Institute for Human Rights, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_5

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empirical examples I’ll be sharing in this chapter originate from work in multiple sectors, and has proven impactful across all sectors. My definition of user and community co-production aligns with that of Loeffler and Bovaird (2016); ‘making better use of each other’s assets and resources to achieve better outcomes or improved efficiency’. While Loeffler and Bovaird argue that this does not always happen in a direct personal relationship between professionals and ‘the people it’s about’ but ‘can also be behaviour change by service users triggered by a new public policy’, I have an even broader view of behavioural change, which I see as being triggered by behavioural design interventions, in general, and not only by ‘new public policy’. Of course, this is because I work on citizen’s co-productive activities across the sectors, and not just co-production of public services or publicly desired outcomes, the subject of the Bovaird and Loeffler (2016) definition. I’ll illustrate this inclusive co-production methodology in facilitating coproduction with ‘the people it’s about’ in four different ways; inclusive co-production as a motivated happening and co-production as automated behavioural change—in both of which the participants do not necessarily realise they are part of co-production, and co-production as informed experiments and inclusive co-production as facilitated design—in both of which the participants know they are part of co-production (without necessarily using the term ‘co-production’).

Common Challenges An international wave of efforts to foster civic engagement and facilitate participatory development in the public and private sector, as well as in the development sector, has emerged over past decades. The dominating approach seems to be to invite ‘the people it’s about’ to give their opinion during a relational interaction between the professional and citizen, or manager and employee, or to invite people to come to workshops, hearing, meetings, and in other ways ask them for advice, input and ideas. The saying ‘Nothing about us without us ’ seems finally to be being taken seriously. However, the question is: Are we getting this right? As an anthropologist, I experience repeatedly how ‘the people it’s about ’ do not feel included in creating the solutions (regardless of being invited and participating), which fosters both frustration, feelings of disempowerment and lack of ownership of the outcome. This is in spite of the fact that the common narrative in most organisations and the self-perception and intention of professionals is that of including ‘the people’ in co-producing the best solutions for their lives, and their communities. This gap between the perceived reality by the professionals and the experienced reality by ‘the people it’s about’ is common in co-production, as is the gap between the ‘intentions to include’ and the tendency to ‘not include’ by professionals. So, how to close these gaps? How to make sure diverse perspectives of ‘the people it’s about’ are actually included and how to make them feel included and empowered?

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I argue here that we have to apply insights from behavioural and social sciences in the facilitation of co-production to make sure the diverse voices of the people are actually being heard and included by both professionals and peers. Moreover, I argue that the kind of user and community co-production defined by Loeffler and Martin (2015) as ‘the most intensive form of citizen engagement where the focus is on joint action and not just civic participation or consultation’ is possible to achieve without inviting people into a process. Sometimes it is much more effective to facilitate motivated happenings and automated behavioural change by applying behavioural design. I will provide some empirical examples of how I have done this and explain the behavioural and social science behind these interventions.

The Human Mind and Behavioural Insights To understand some of the hidden barriers to inclusive user and community co-production and inclusive outcomes it is highly relevant to understand the psychological and social mechanisms at play in any kind of human interaction, collaboration, change and group activity. Understanding the human mind and behavioural drivers are key factors. Researchers have proven that the human mind does not operate in a ‘rational’ manner—we human beings do not always behave as we intend to do, nor in accordance with our values or what we rationally know to be important. The human mind operates through two interconnected modes of thinking. These are widely referred to as system 1 (the automatic system) and system 2 (the effortful system) (Stanovich and West 2000; Kahneman 2011). System 1 is unconscious and operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort. It is instinctive, emotional and associative. System 2 is conscious, self-reflective and analytical, and it allocates attention to the effortful mental activities, choice and concentration. As research shows, system 1 is the main source of our explicit beliefs and values, deliberate choices and the intentions which system 2 reflects on, and it controls most of our behaviour and decisions. There is strong evidence of a gap between our self-perception (system 2) and our actual behaviour (system 1), and between our explicit intentions (system 2) and our biased behaviour and decisions (system 1). This gap between system 1 and system 2 influences co-production, with the result that the diversity of perspectives is not included in the solutions and ‘the people it’s about’ do not feel heard. Other hidden barriers are the mental shortcuts in system 1, called heuristics, that enable people to make judgements and decisions quickly and efficiently (survival instinct). Though heuristics are highly economical and usually effective in helping us to stay safe, recognise information and automatically react, and predict what to do in specific situations, they also lead to systematic errors—cognitive biases. Bias is present in everything we do and has a much bigger influence on community co-production than recognised. Bias is a key reason why the diversity of perspectives, knowledge and insights that ‘the

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people it’s about’ bring into a co-production process is not used, thus leaving them feeling not-included and disempowered—even when professionals and peers intend to be inclusive (with their rational mind—system 2). I’ll give just a few examples of biases (out of more than 200 biases which have been identified). The anchoring bias is the human tendency to be overly influenced by the first piece of information that we hear, which then influences the entire thought process following. The confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out, favour, interpret and remember information in a way that confirms our previously held beliefs or perceptions (of situations, people and issues). The more emotionally charged are the issues and the more deeply entrenched are beliefs, the stronger the effect of the confirmation bias (Nickerson 1998). Confirmation bias is also connected with social skills, e.g. the way we ask questions to people. For example, we tend to frame questions to confirm our first instinctive perception of the people we interact with, and the level of empathy also aligns with these biased judgements (Dardenne and Leyens 1995). The attribution error bias (Heider 1958) affects the way we attribute the causes of events or behaviours to the actions and behaviour of others. External attributions are blamed on situational forces, while internal attributions are blamed on individual characteristics and traits. When it comes to our own actions, we are far too likely to attribute things to external influences (shortage of time, stressful environment) but in explaining other people’s actions we are far more likely to attribute their behaviours to internal causes, such as being lazy or too sensitive. This influences how we listen to each other in co-production and how competent we perceive other people to be, thus the importance we attribute to their contribution. Attribution error bias can also influence co-production by strengthening the power asymmetry between professionals and ‘the people it’s about’ and strengthening the perceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, causing polarisation and resistance in collaboration. Community co-production processes are furthermore influenced by how we instinctively perceive people on two social perception traits, namely warmth (trustworthiness, likability, friendliness, helpfulness) and competence (skills, knowledge, authority, power). These instinctive perceptions trigger emotional reactions and stereotypes influencing whether we are active or passive in our interaction (Cuddy et al. 2008). Another hidden barrier to inclusive co-production is the human preference for tribalism, which is a strong evolutionary mental mechanism, resulting in people both unconsciously and consciously seeking out similarities in other people to establish feelings of common identity and belonging. We form socalled ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ based on similarities, and we tend to listen more to and process more of the information and ideas shared by people we perceive as ‘similar others’. We simply believe more in the people from our own ‘tribes’. We tend to be more sceptical, process less, listen less and interact less with those from out-groups (Tajfel et al. 1979).

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Another challenge, which makes things even worse, is that we are blind to our own biases, stereotypes and mind gaps. What we cannot see, we do not change. All of these hidden psychological and social mechanisms will influence any kind of interactive co-production where a diverse group of people is participating, thus also the outcome. This is part of the reason why we often don’t benefit enough from ‘inviting’ a lot of people into user and community co-production. Unfortunately, the outcome of the co-production process is also influenced (and often skewed) by the handover to decision-makers or politicians, because they are as much influenced by bias as anyone else in how they perceive the results and suggestions from the process. They will interpret based on their personal preferences, based on what they recognise as familiar and based on what confirms their belief and makes them feel safe. All of this helps explain why so many people do not feel they have a voice or are listened to, even when they are actually invited to participate in coproduction. Because of the gap between the two systems in the human mind, the increased commitments by public and private organisations to co-produce and the professionals’ knowledge of the importance of including ‘the people it’s about’ will not ensure inclusive co-production. Clearly, we need to ensure, as far as possible, that the process and final decisions that get made and the actions that are taken are not based on biases of the people/stakeholders involved but rather occur in a process where the negative effects of such biases are limited. In my many years working as an inclusion and diversity professional, I have been experimenting with practical ways to mitigate bias, foster collaboration and achieve outcomes that are more inclusive. One effective way is to make people see what they are blind to and make people hear what they cannot hear, because this contributes to closing the gap and enabling people to be more inclusive. Rather than using the rational arguments favoured in system 2, this requires communicating to the unconscious mind, making people feel the need to be inclusive, by triggering the heuristics in system 1, helping us listen in ways that move us to take action and co-produce with the people it’s about. I will give an empirical example of an intervention based on behavioural insights, to show how these mental processes can be changed from being barriers to becoming levers for change and co-production.

The Speech Bubble Intervention The purpose of this intervention is to motivate managers/leaders in a large organisation to engage in solving a problem, take action, and co-produce local solutions to the problem together with the employees. This particular problem was unacceptable behaviour (harassment, discrimination, bullying, etc.) but the intervention is relevant for many other issues. This design has since been used in urban development, multinationals, public services and humanitarian

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organisations to address issues such as reducing conflict between clans in a refugee camp, loneliness at work and engaging residents in city development. In this global organisation, the annual employee survey showed an increased number of employees experiencing unacceptable behaviour. The managers and leaders saw the numbers and knew (with their rational mind, system 2) that changes needed to happen, but they had not taken action. There were a couple of other challenges. Often, when presenting this kind of ‘unpleasant’ data and reality, many leaders would rationally try to deal with this by discussing the legal definition of harassment, discrimination, etc., and in this way distance themselves from the issue. Often someone would conclude that many of the experiences of the employees would not fit this legal definition, and that some people ‘are just too sensitive’. Often, as the Head of Inclusion, Diversity and Collaboration, I had been ‘shot as the messenger’ when bringing this kind of unpleasant message, instead of the issue being discussed. I needed to avoid these kinds of reactions, since this would get us nowhere. I designed the ‘Speech Bubble Intervention’ (Kepinski and Nielsen 2020) to target the behavioural drivers in the unconscious mind (system 1) to motivate and enable the leaders to take action. Together with some colleagues, I collected personal stories and examples of staff having experienced unacceptable behaviour in this organisation. We wrote all their stories in first person quotes (anonymised). We printed the examples in speech bubbles, and covered the walls of the leadership meeting room from floor to ceiling, giving a voice to people who never felt heard when speaking up or who did not dare to speak up. As the leaders entered the meeting room, we said ‘Your people have something to tell you’ and we invited the leaders to walk around and read ‘the experiences of your [company name] colleagues and employees ’. I remember well the first couple of times we facilitated this intervention with executives and top leaders and it still gives me the shivers. The silence was palpable as they were reading. We hoped they would read at least 4–5 examples—actually, they read all of them. When the leaders started speaking with each other, they were expressing emotions (which rarely happened in this organisation—the social norms was ‘be assertive’). They were whispering as they expressed feelings such as anger, surprise, sadness, shame, disappointment, disgust: ‘I feel disgusted that this is going on in our workplace’, ‘I feel so sad’, ‘How can this be going on right in front of us, without us knowing?’, ‘I feel nauseous, I can’t read any more’, ‘These are my colleagues and I feel ashamed that I didn’t know what they go through’ and ‘I actually think, I said some of that myself’. We also humanised the numbers. Instead of talking about 15% of employees, we wrote on a big poster ‘15% = 4935 people. That is 4935 [company name] colleagues ’. Furthermore, we reversed the business case, focusing on the losses, based on research findings from other organisations to which we had access at the time, showing that a person experiencing this kind of unacceptable behaviour over a long period loses 30% of their decisionmaking ability, and one person in a team of 8 who experiences this has a

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negative spill over on the productivity of the entire team, so that it drops 12.5%. With this intervention, the discussion changed, passive and reluctant behaviour changed to active and engaging behaviour. Normally, they would delegate the task to the HR department to create a new policy and get global compliance. Here, it was different. The leaders took action themselves. They did not need a new policy and long action plan. They suggested several simple actions they could take themselves immediately. Within 10 minutes, we had co-produced a plan for how to involve the entire community of managers and employees globally in the organisation. One leader said, ‘The other leaders need to experience this, we can’t tell them this, they need to feel what we felt. Let’s send this on a tour, so the others can experience this as well ’. He had captured the very essence and purpose of this intervention in one sentence. He intuitively knew the importance of ‘feeling the need’ to change this problem instead of ‘rational understanding’. They also made a decision immediately to add the issue of ‘mentally safe work environment’ on the agenda of every weekly leadership team meeting in the entire global organisation. The intervention toured internally and many people in the organisation listened to the voices of their colleagues, and saw what they were blind to. It led to local initiatives emerging and many managers and leaders involved the employees in creating solutions to foster the needed changes for a more inclusive workplace culture. Co-production spread organically throughout the organisation as motivated happenings .

Inclusive Co-production as a Motivated Happening This is what I call inclusive co-production as a motivated happening without the people necessarily realising they are part of co-production and without having explicitly agreed to co-produce. This kind of co-production happens because we appeal to system 1 in the brain, motivating many people to engage in joint action for change. It is about making the unconscious mind feel the need to be inclusive, and feel the need to take action. Several insights from behavioural and social sciences were applied in the design of the ‘speech bubble’ intervention to influence the unconscious mind in multiple ways. Activate tribal mentality: The first sentence ‘Your colleagues/employees have something to tell you’ is designed to trigger the tribal mentality ‘this is my tribe’ and ‘I am their leader – I am supposed to protect my tribe’. The effect of triggering our tribalism towards our in-group is emotional engagement. We listen more closely to our tribe members. Change the Messenger: This intervention changed the messenger from being the ‘facilitator’ to being ‘the people’. The messenger powerfully influences our behaviour and, when our peers are the messenger, it often has a bigger influence on what we do, how we listen and what we hear (Dolan et al. 2010).

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Trigger empathy and pain: Experiencing other people being treated badly, being discriminated against and being socially excluded triggers the area of the brain where physical pain and empathy are located, even when we’re not directly experiencing it ourselves and motivates us to want to change this (Novembre et al. 2015). Humanise the numbers: Numbers and data are communicated to the rational mind (system 2) but it is system 1 that is controlling our behaviour. Numbers do not motivate system 1 to take actions. Emotional reactions do. Therefore, it is important to humanise the numbers. The ‘visual voices’ do that, combined with the conversion of percentages into actual number of people with an identity (the company name). This activates the feeling of a social bond with ‘similar others’. Loss-aversion bias is triggered by being confronted with losses, such as loss of staff’s decision-making ability and team productivity, or the threat of losing image as professional leaders (by not having taken action to change this); pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). The basic principle of loss aversion can explain why penalty framing (losing money, performance, business, etc.) is sometimes more effective than reward framing in motivating people (Gächter et al. 2009). Reversing the ‘business case’ in this intervention proved to be motivational. The strength of this approach is that it motivates a person to take action even when they know they can’t control the outcome. It empowers ‘the people it’s about’ to apply their diverse insights and ideas in joint effort with peers and they all own the solutions. Another strength is that the people often realise that they themselves are as much a part of the problem as ‘the others’, which in many cases has led to mitigation of the feeling of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the attribution error bias, and fosters social cohesion and a more inclusive culture.

Keep Focus on the People in the Entire Process This intervention addresses several other challenges—in co-production we need access to diverse perspectives, and also to the people who often don’t have a voice. Some do not have the opportunity to share their experiences or perspectives on an issue. People in vulnerable situations are often left out, sometimes are not even invited, and sometimes too vulnerable to participate. An intervention like this includes them indirectly, makes sure their voices are collected (e.g. in their home, in the street or elsewhere) and shared. Another challenge is that people, both in privileged positions and nonprivileged positions, may find it difficult to grasp each other’s problems (due to in-group and out-groups, as well as ethnocentrism). They need real examples of the lived reality of the other people to improve their ability to be open minded in co-creation. Another challenge in co-production is how to make sure people listen—and how to ensure they keep a focus on ‘the people it’s about’, even when those

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people are not physically co-producing. When people are out of sight, they are often out of mind. With this intervention, the voices of ‘the people’ were easily made visible throughout the process and all the time. Another challenge of co-production with and for ‘the people it is about’ is that the diversity of perspectives that characterises ‘the people it’s about’ often gets lost in transition. Facilitators of the co-production process often have to hand over and/or communicate the insights to decision-makers, politicians, entrepreneurs, etc. who will decide what happens next, and what kind of resources to allocate. ‘The people it’s about’ are often turned into numbers, percentages, graphs, statistics and spreadsheets in the handover, meaning that the communication is to the rational mind (system 2) instead of the unconscious mind (system 1). These stakeholders also need to feel empathy for ‘the people it’s about’ in order to make choices that benefit both people, institution and budget and not just the latter, as is often the case in decision-making. My experience is that a behavioural design as simple as the ‘speech bubble’ intervention can mitigate all these challenges, and close the gap tween the two systems in the mind, and at the same time empower people to take joint action.

Inclusive Co-production as Informed Experiments When facilitating the kind of interventions that motivate people to engage and include, such as the speech bubble intervention, there is a risk of increasing complexity. The result can be counter-productive, if, instead of enabling participants to co-produce and take action, it paralyses the unconscious mind, which then retreats to default behaviours and decisions. This happens often with inclusive behaviour—most people simply don’t know how to do it (hence the gap between intention and actions). To avoid this, providing participants with practical examples of interventions that have been proved to work in other and similar situations/issues is very effective in enabling them to engage in co-production by making what I call ‘informed experiments’. Research about the effect of learning through examples shows that in the initial phase of learning something new, we learn better and faster by studying worked-out solutions and understanding the reasoning behind the solution (the ‘worked example effect’), rather than having to come up with the solution on our own by applying the theory (Mayer 2008). Solving a challenge or problem in a novel area is very complex—since our working memory is limited and we are not able to joggle or process a lot of new information at the same time, our mind experiences cognitive overload at the risk of making error or getting stuck (Sweller 2006). The ‘worked examples’ approach has proven impact in enabling people to co-produce as part of their daily actions and experiment with new ways of working that benefit the organisation and the people involved. Here is an empirical example.

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Empirical Example of Informed Experiments In an organisation, the leaders had come to realise that they too often did not hire the best-qualified candidate for vacant positions. Turnover rates were high and teams were frustrated. They reached out for help. I knew that they were blind to their biases in the evaluation and selection process, and facilitated an intervention, which targeted system 1. It was a job/candidate CV evaluation exercise. Each leader had to evaluate one candidate for the same position. All candidates had 100% identical CVs and narratives about behaviour in work and social related situations but pictures, names, gender and skin colour was different for each of the candidates. All the scores of the candidates were compared visually on a board in plenary, so the leaders immediately could identify patterns of how the rating was different due to picture, name, gender, etc. The motivational nudge of the unconscious mind happens when people see and realise that they rate merit and qualifications differently for men and women, for white and dark skin, for Latino and Scandinavian, and that this behaviour does not match their intentions to hire the best qualified nor their self-perception as professional leaders. The purpose is to help them see what they are blind to, by showing (system 1), not telling (system 2). Co-production as a ‘motivated happening’ occurred from this intervention. The leaders quickly agreed to anonymise the candidates on applications and they came up with several ways to do this on their own (e.g. by having a secretary hide identity data, informing applicants to write identity data on a separate page, etc.), since the IT-recruitment system did not do this automatically. The challenge in this particular case was bigger than just motivating them to make changes such as hiding identity data, because a recruitment process consists of many steps and critical choice points, where bias has an influence, all of which need to be addressed in order to solve the problem. Even though recruitment was a familiar process for the leaders, applying behavioural insights to redesign each process step was novel to them and the complexity involved was too high. If they had to come up with all of the solutions themselves, that could have created cognitive overload at the risk of them making error and getting stuck. When motivating people with eye-opening interventions as described above, it is critical to enable people to take action immediately. Without the ability to act when they are motivated, people retreat to default behaviours. They need solutions for how to take action, but telling them (system 2) what to do would not get them to do it (system 1). What I did instead was to enable the leaders to co-produce changes in each process step, through practical ‘worked out’ examples. The leaders were given a small folder of cards with these examples of how to redesign the recruitment processes to improve the evaluation and decision-making (and make it inclusive and mitigate unconscious bias). They implemented several of these and over time created new solutions themselves as well.

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This is an example of what I call inclusive co-production as informed experiments , both as individual experiments (leaders) and small group experiments, where leaders experiment together, sometimes with employees, sometimes with candidates. The results in this case were impactful. After a year, the success rate of new hires had improved by 60% (measured by those still employed after 6 months and 12 months) and team frustration levels had reduced significantly. Just as Pestoff (2012) suggests small group of co-production can be particularly important, I suggest that co-production as individual actions combined with peer co-production is important. Empirical evidence shows that not only can small group co-productive action provide benefits in terms of ‘individual self-interest’ (aligning behaviour with self-perception as professional leader) and ‘collective self-interest’ (hiring the best-qualified candidate), but it can also generate intensive collective interaction (experimenting together). It is therefore rather more likely than large-scale co-production groups to impact on social capital and reciprocity, as well as sharing and learning.

Inclusive Co-production as a Facilitated Design Process We turn now to co-production as a facilitated design process, which I call Inclusive Co-Design & Behavioural Change Methodology (Nielsen 2016). This is a conceptual model of co-production as a dynamic circular process over time, where multiple stakeholders, such as the ‘people it is about’, professionals, subject experts, politicians, etc. are actively involved and where a change maker or expert in facilitating the methodology leads the co-production process. The methodology ensures inclusive input, inclusive process and inclusive outcomes (for example, inclusive workplaces, communities, cities, policies, societies, social welfare, technology, algorithms, decision-making, etc.). The purpose is to enable and empower as many people as possible to apply insights from behavioural and social sciences in any kind of development or change effort, to co-design new inclusive solutions together by being inclusive of diverse perspectives in the entire co-design and co-production process. The empirical evidence provides various examples of how this process gives a feeling of ownership on the part of ‘the people it’s about’ and joint action (both as individual and collective activities), which is essential to co-production as defined by Loeffler and Bovaird (2016). The focus of the analysis and design is three core components influencing human behaviour and behavioural change: motivation, perception and ability. The process addresses a specific challenge systematically, starting by identifying the status quo in terms of current behaviour, perceptions and abilities and identifying desired behaviour. Barriers and levers for creating this movement of change current behaviour to desired behaviour are analysed and, based on this analysis, behavioural drivers (heuristics, bias, group dynamics, social needs, etc.) to be targeted are identified. This inclusive analysis is the basis for the

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Fig. 5.1 Inclusive co-design and behavioural change methodology designed by Tinna C. Nielsen, 2015 (copyright)

design of interventions and co-production of changes. Figure 5.1 provides a visualisation of the process.

Engage the People to Observe and Identify Patterns The core principle of this process is to engage and enable ‘the people it’s about’ in co-production. One way to do this is to make them ethnographers and anthropologists of their own life and of the lives of the people, they should co-produce with. This means enabling them to observe and describe (ethnography) their own behaviour, rituals, words, narratives, actions, and that of their community or workplace, colleagues or ‘service provider’, and identify and analyse patterns (anthropology) as well as the implications of these. Very often professional ethnographers and anthropologists are hired to do this and create input for a design or development process. However, this does not engage ‘the people it’s about’ and therefore does not give them ownership, and empower them to take joint action to make sure both the process and outcome have real impact. Consequently, this commonly used approach is actually excluding rather than including ‘the people it’s about’. User and community co-production will only be truly inclusive when it engages, empowers and enables ‘the people it’s about’.

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Inclusive Kick Off to Motivate for Change Instead of Motivating for Co-production The literature about user and community co-production (Loeffler and Bovaird 2016) highlights the primary motivators for people to engage in coproduction as intrinsic motivation, such as self-esteem, social recognition and power. An inclusive co-production process starts with a motivational intervention (such as the CV intervention and Speech Bubble interventions) to ensure that people are motivated to engage in the change that is needed because they care about the issue and now see it from a new perspective (‘see what they are blind to’). The lack of motivation to participate has been identified as a main barrier in user and community co-production but the challenge is motivating people to engage in co-production because they ‘feel the need’ to do so (system 1).

Mitigate Unconscious Bias Throughout the Process Given that co-production is about finding new and better solutions, it is important to mitigate bias and preferences for information, knowledge, insights and ideas that we unconsciously recognise as familiar, throughout the entire process. This can be done with simple process design such as: • Anonymous and written sharing: Participants write their input on notes (anonymously) before anyone talks. This ensures that contributors experience psychological safety and everyone has access to a diversity of voices and perspectives (Kepinski and Nielsen 2020). • Reversed default: for example, instead of discussing which ideas are best and why, the default starting point is ‘all ideas are the best’ and ‘why not this idea?’. This changes the perspective (Kepinski and Nielsen 2020). • Perspective taking: the ability to take the perspective of others—prompted by questions about what others would have done, such as ‘What would your grandfather do about this?’ or ‘What would a community member with a chronic disease do here?’. It decreases stereotypical biases at both conscious and non-conscious level (Galinsky and Moskowitz 2000). This mitigates bias and stereotypes in the co-production process—but not by the intentional suppression of stereotypical thoughts, because that has been proven by research ironically to produce the very thoughts one is suppressing (Macrae et al. 1994). • Flip Questions: Encourage participants to ask so-called Flip Questions (Kepinski and Nielsen 2020) inside their own mind, as they interact. Examples are ‘If he was not a social welfare recipient, but a doctor, would I find him more competent?’ or ‘If she was a man, would I interpret what she just did differently?’. This helps to change biased judgements and perceptions during interaction, thus also to change behaviour (the way we listen and engage).

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In a facilitated co-production process, evaluation of diverse inputs and ideas by participants in the process is ongoing. Various biases will inevitably occur. Therefore, the process is designed and facilitated to mitigate biases, as well as to counter negative group dynamics, such as group conformity. This has proven an effective way to access diversity of thought, give people a voice and ensure a feeling of inclusion and empowerment, as well as ownership during and after the process.

Inclusive Co-production as Automated Behavioural Change Apart from being an effective means to engage multiple stakeholders, ensuring empowerment and ownership, Inclusive Co-Design & Behavioural Change Methodology was originally created to enable professional change makers to design behavioural interventions that would foster automated behavioural change for inclusive outcomes in large groups of people. These interventions are called Inclusion Nudges, a term coined by Tinna C. Nielsen and Lisa Kepinski, 2013 (published in the Inclusion Nudges Guidebooks, 2015, 2016, 2020). An Inclusion Nudge is a non-intrusive behavioural intervention and design, that influences the unconscious mind to act more inclusively, change perceptions and mitigate unconscious bias and stereotypes, thus enabling the brain to make more objective evaluations and decisions, and promoting more inclusive behaviours and cultures. The Inclusion Nudges change approach (Kepinski and Nielsen 2020) merges Nudge theory (Thaler and Sunstein 2008) and knowledge about the challenges of achieving inclusion, diversity and equality with practical expertise on how to apply behavioural insights to foster more inclusive organisations, communities, technologies, cities, policies, societies, etc. Out of years of experimentation, Kepinski and Nielsen (2020) identified three types of designed interventions which have proven to be impactful in fostering inclusive behaviour, culture and systems and to engage people from diverse background and all walks of life. • Feel the Need Inclusion Nudges—motivational interventions that motivate groups of people to engage and take ownership of the needed change. The ‘Speech Bubble’ intervention and CV intervention are examples of how to make people feel the need for change, instead of relying on people rationally and consciously understanding the need for change. • Process Design Inclusion Nudges—designing organisational and decisionmaking processes, policies, and systems that mitigate cognitive bias and stereotypes, discrimination and exclusion, as well as enabling groups to behave inclusively as the default and norm.

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• Framing Perception Inclusion Nudges—interventions designed to foster perceptions that support inclusion, equality and diversity by creating positive (unconscious) associations, and also prime the unconscious mind to mitigate bias and stereotypes. These three types of Inclusion Nudges all build on the same principles of nudging. The behavioural changes are not driven by threat of punishment and people are not being forced. They are free to choose and to opt out. The strength of nudging is the automated change in large groups of people. Nudging is choice architecture. A nudge is a design of a choice process/environment based on insights about the human mind and drivers of behaviour, that influence choice and behaviour in a predictable direction. Thaler and Sunstein (2008) define a good nudge as a policy change or design that makes it easy for people (the unconscious mind) to make choices that are in their self-interest and the interest of their community, families and society. Too often community co-production and change efforts do not result in the needed changes because the focus has not been on creating sustainable behavioural changes. We cannot only rely on personal relationships between, for example, civil servants and citizens or manager and employee, for coproduction to happen. Loeffler and Bovaird (2016) also include in their definition of user and community co-production ‘behaviour change by service users which are triggered by a new public policy’. Behavioural economics and nudging have proven to be effective means to achieve behaviour change in large groups of people to support public policy aims. I consider Inclusion Nudges a means to achieve user and community coproduction as automated behavioural change that promotes truly inclusive and diverse organisations, communities, policies and societies, because they provide a very effective way to apply a lens of inclusion, diversity and equality in every kind of development work without relying on consciously convincing a large group of people about the need for inclusiveness. Given the state of the world, with increased inequality and its consequences (World Economic Forum, Global Risk Reports, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019), inclusivity should no longer be an option or choice. It should be a default and the norm in everything we do.

Why Nudging and Inclusion Nudges Are Effective Means of Co-production Effortless: As Loeffler et al. (2008) have documented, a common challenge is lower levels of engagement in co-production when people have to undertake activities that require interactions with other citizens or need much effort from themselves. Inclusion Nudges overcome this challenge because they influence people to co-produce change without having to interact and make an effort. The very essence of nudging is to make the changes effortless.

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Low cost: Given that co-production is considered by many to be cost-heavy due to longer processes and without guarantee that the outcome will be successful and without additional costs, applying behavioural design can be an advantage. It has been proven that nudging and Inclusion Nudges are almost costless to apply (Thaler and Sunstein 2008; OECD 2017; Kepinski and Nielsen 2020).

Limitations of Nudging and Inclusion Nudges in Co-production As effective as Inclusion Nudges and nudging have proven to be, when it comes to designing interventions that result in behavioural change to improve the lives of the people, nudging does not create the sense of empowerment that is at the core of the most successful and sustainable community and societal changes. Given the increasing number of governmental nudge units (OECD 2017), we should be careful that co-production with ‘the people it’s about’ is not reduced to nudging. We need the positive spin-off on human connectedness and social cohesion, as well as enthusiasm and the feeling of empowerment that comes from the interactive and relational kind of co-production.

Closing Remarks: The Importance of Broadening Our Understanding of Co-production In this chapter, I have provided examples of the potential from applying psychological and anthropological insights and behavioural design, and why this needs more attention in user and community co-production processes in the field of organisational development, humanitarian development, city planning, public policy and public administration, and any other domain that influences the lives of people. Co-production has the potential of significantly improving societies along multiple dimensions when done in ways that make people feel included, which is when they feel listened to and when they feel autonomy, competence and social connectedness. Research on happiness and well-being have found that people who contribute to and participate in public life are more satisfied with their personal lives (Bok 2011). Moreover, helping to shape the decisions that affect their own life and other peoples’ is fundamental to human well-being (Sen 2001). When compared to other indicators of well-being, co-production has one of the greatest effects on long-term happiness and healthier lives (Pinker 2015) because it forges personal connections and creates a joint sense of purpose. Maybe then, the process of co-production in itself has an equally important impact as the outcomes it brings about. Consequently, the level and quality of co-production needs to improve significantly and ‘the people it’s about’ need to feel included and empowered.

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Many stakeholders have not yet recognised the full potential of community co-production. One dominant reason that I experience in my work is a perception that it is a burden and too time-consuming to engage with ‘the people it’s about’, and not cost effective. Not only have too many people still not realised how fundamental it is to a well-functioning society that people feel empowered, they have not realised how damaging the feeling of disempowerment is to society. Disempowerment has been identified as a global risk in the World Economic Forum Global Risk reports for several years now. The feeling of not having influence and control over your life, and how your society develops, is strongly correlated with unhappiness and an unhealthy life, and social polarisation. The psychological need for significance, as well as for feeling included and belonging to a group with a joint purpose and norms, is what leads people to extremism, not religion or ideology (Kruglanski et al. 2014), which is a common misunderstanding. Making sure people are included, have a voice, feel listened to, and feel their insights and perspectives matters is not only important, it is crucial as our societies are increasingly polarising and social cohesion is declining. We are beyond inclusive co-production being ‘nice to have’. It is a societal necessity and must be the default and norm in any kind of development, policy making and decision-making that influence the lives of ‘the people it’s about’. The four types of inclusive co-production approaches outlined in this chapter also serve as a contribution to another challenge. One of the limitations of user and community co-production highlighted in research is the assumption that for it to work, both citizens and service professionals must (1) have something valuable to contribute, (2) be willing to make that contribution, and (3) experience conditions in which these contributions can be made efficiently and effectively (Loeffler and Bovaird 2016). This article has provided revealing examples of how this may not be the case—successful coproduction can happen without conscious, willing, and effortful contributions, and that all ‘the people it’s about’ have something to contribute, even though they might not know it. Co-production of change for common purposes can happen in the interest of people without them having realised the need for a particular change in the system, community or policy. There are now increased efforts to use co-production not only in public administration but also in NGOs and private companies, with real interest in applying behavioural insights and achieving more inclusive outcomes. This is a chance for scholars to study the intersections between these sectors and provide more evidence for practitioners and policymakers on how to get coproduction right, how to be truly inclusive, how to close the gaps and how to achieve inclusive outcomes for the greater good of all of us.

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References Bok, D. (2011). The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (Eds.), (2016). Public Management and Governance. London: Routledge. Cuddy, A.J., Fiske, S., & Glick, P. (2008). Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions of Social Perception: The Stereotype Content Model and the BIAS Map. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 40(1): 61–149. Dardenne, B., & Leyens, J. (1995). Confirmation Bias as a Social Skill. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(11): 1229–1239. Dolan, P., Hallsworth, M., Halpern, D., King, D., & Vlaev, I. (2010). MINDSPACE: Influencing Behaviour through Public Policy. http://www.instituteforgovernment. org.uk/publications/mindspace. Accessed September 27, 2016. Gächter, S., Orzen, H., Renner, E., & Starmer, C. (2009). Are Experimental Economists Prone to Framing Effects? A Natural Field Experiment. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 70: 443–446. Galinsky, A., & Moskowitz, G. (2000). Perspective-Taking: Decreasing Stereotype Expression, Stereotype Accessibility, and In-Group Favoritism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4): 708–724. Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Psychology Press. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kepinski, L., & Nielsen, T. (2020). Inclusion Nudges Guidebook. 3rd edition. Aarhus, Denmark: The Inclusion Nudges Global Initiative. Kruglanski, A.W., Gelfand, M., Bélanger J.J., Sheveland, A., Hetiarachchi, M., & Gunaratna, R. (2014). The Psychology of Radicalization and Deradicalization: How Significance Quest Impacts Violent Extremism. Political Psychology, 35: 69–93. Loeffler, E., & Bovaird, T. (2016). User and Community Co-Production of Public Services: What Does the Evidence Tell Us? International Journal of Public Administration, November 2016. Loeffler, E., & Martin, S. (2015). Citizen engagement. In T. Bovaird & E. Loeffler (eds.), Public Management and Governance. 3rd edition. London, UK: Routledge. Loeffler, E., Parrado, S., Bovaird, T., & van Ryzin, G. (2008). If You Want to Go Fast, Walk Alone: If You Want to Go Far, Walk Together. Citizens and the CoProduction of Public Services. Report to EU Presidency. Paris, France: Ministry of Finance, Budget & Public Services. Macrae, C.N., Bodenhansen, G.V., Miine, A.B., & Jetten, J. (1994). Out of Mind but Back in Sight: Stereotypes on the Rebound. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67: 808–817. Mayer, R. (2008). Learning and Instruction. 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc. Nickerson, R.S. (1998). Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2): 175–220. Nielsen, T. (2016). Inclusive Co-Design & Behavioural Change Methodology. Graphic Illustration. http://www.movetheelephant.org. Novembre, G., Zanon, M., & Silani, G. (2015). Empathy for Social Exclusion Involves the Sensory-Discriminative Component of Pain: A Within-Subject fMRI Study. SCAN , 10: 153–164.

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OECD. (2017). Behavioural Insights and Public Policy: Lessons from Around the World. Paris: OECD Publishing. Pestoff, V. (2012). Co-Production and Third Sector Social Services in Europe: Some Crucial Conceptual Issues. In V. Pestoff, T. Brandsen, & B. Verschuere (Eds.), New Public Governance, the Third Sector and Co-Production. London, UK: Routledge. Pinker, S. (2015). The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier. Toronto: Penguin Random House. Sen, A. (2001). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stanovich, K.E., & West, R.F. (2000). Individual Difference in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(5): 645–726. Sweller, J. (2006). The Worked Example Effect and Human Cognition. Learning and Instruction, 16(2): 165–169. Tajfel, H., Turner, J.C., Austin, W.G., & Worchel, S. (1979). An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict. Organizational Identity: A Reader (pp. 56–65). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thaler, R., & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 27, 185(4157): 1124–1131. World Economic Forum, Global Risk Reports from: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019.

PART III

Different Perspectives on Co-production

CHAPTER 6

Co-production from a Public Service Logic Perspective Kirsty Strokosch and Stephen P. Osborne

Introduction Over the past decade, co-production as an approach to public service reform has become of increasing interest to policymakers, public service managers and academics alike (Fledderus et al. 2015; Voorberg et al. 2015; Nabatchi et al. 2017). It has been described as a ‘revolutionary concept’ lauded for its potential to induce service improvement and to achieve broad policy goals by placing public service users at the heart of service delivery (Pestoff 2006; Bovaird 2007; Dunston et al. 2009; Thomsen 2017). Despite the existence of an influential literature on co-production, however, its conceptualisation has been criticised for lacking clarity (Osborne et al. 2016) and some uncertainty surrounds its potential to catalyse transformation (Verschuere et al. 2012; Voorberg et al. 2015). This chapter will discuss the evolution of the concept within four narratives of public service reform: New Public Management, Public Value, New Public Service and New Public Governance. It will explore the following three research questions: how has coproduction been conceptualised and understood within each narratives; which factors enable co-production; and which have constrained its transformative potential? Through the analysis, it will be argued that there are substantial challenges impeding the operationalisation of co-production that have not been sufficiently understood and resolved in theory or practice. Drawing on

K. Strokosch (B) · S. P. Osborne University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_6

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the emerging Public Service Logic (PSL), the discussion will suggest that coproduction should be understood within a more holistic framework, which understands participation as a multi-dimensional process that influences value creation during the design, delivery and contextualisation of public services.

Understanding Co-production The genesis of the concept was the work of Ostrom (1978) who, with colleagues, defined co-production as the combined effort of ‘regular producers’ and consumers who are voluntarily and actively involved in the process of service production (Parks et al. 1981). Here, co-production was positioned both as an alternative to the inadequacies of traditional Public Administration (Levine and Fisher 1984; Brudney 1987) and a means of offsetting increasing budgetary constraints by shifting the costs of public service production to citizens (Sundeen 1988; Alford and O’Flynn 2009). In this sense, it was described as different to traditional production where public services were produced by public service staff alone, and offering potential for service transformation by drawing on service users’ unique skills, resources and motivations (Parks et al. 1981; Brudney and England 1983). The conceptualisation of co-production within this early literature took two distinct streams of thought, the discussion of which is core to the analysis presented here. The first emphasised the potentially critical role played by citizens during service production, while the second has its foundations in a classical view of citizen participation (Brudney 1987). Within the former, coproduction was defined as a fundamental element of most public services and particularly those such as health and education which have a core relational dimension (Whitaker 1980; Brudney and England 1983). The second stream of thought focused on co-production as a distinct mode of citizen participation. Ostrom (1996, 149), for example, latterly described co-production as ‘an alternative institutional rule’, positioning it normatively as a means of promoting participative democracy. Indeed, the terms co-production and participation have been used interchangeably in much of the early literature, with co-production being delineated as citizen participation during public service delivery, as opposed to service planning or policy making (Percy 1983; Whitaker 1980; Brudney and England 1983). This strong participatory narrative has continued to underpin much of the co-production literature (Ostrom 1996; Alford 2002; Nabatchi et al. 2017). Despite strong criticism (e.g. Fung 2006; Tritter and McCallum 2006) Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of civic engagement, for example, has continued to feature as a means of describing and understanding the extent to which individuals co-produce services (e.g. Bovaird 2007; Denhardt and Denhardt 2015a; Jun and Bryer 2017). Co-production is generally identified at the upper end of the model, as a partnership approach where service users (as individuals or in groups) are empowered to collaborate with public service organisations (PSOs) during service production (Pestoff 2014). The literature has also retained the idea

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that the relationship between service users and public service staff is active, co-operative and voluntary and in no way coerced or obligated (Brandsen and Honingh 2016; Nabatchi et al. 2017). By consequence, co-production is generally defined as an appended process of participation rather than an integral dimension of relational services (Osborne and Strokosch 2013).

Co-production Within the Narratives of Public Service Reform While co-production emerged in scholarly debates and in practice in the late 1970s, interest in the concept lost resonance with the advent of the New Public Management (NPM) which has developed as the pre-eminent narrative of public service reform. NPM is underpinned by public choice theory (Hood 1991) which, in its simplest form, positions the market as the optimal structure to produce measurable public service outputs and the application of private management experience to their delivery (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004). Despite its various iterations, managerialism has typically been positioned as a core component of the NPM, which has implications for the configuration of roles of public managers and citizens during public service production. On one hand, managerialism endorses closed decision-making practices, where skilled public managers/professionals are understood as producing public services alone (King et al. 1998; Christensen and Laegreid 2011). On the other, citizens are reconceptualised as consumers, empowered not by civic participation but rather by market mechanisms of information, choice and redress (Hirschman 1970). The differentiation of roles has left limited space for co-production, but a range of reforms implemented in the 1990s sought to shift emphasis to consumer empowerment. Within these, co-production was framed as a user-led approach where consumers have opportunities and responsibilities to engage in the design and delivery of public services (Martin and Boaz 2000; Aberbach and Christensen 2005). In line with the early literature, co-production was justified within an economic rationale. Devolving responsibility to consumer co-producers was perceived as a means of substituting the efforts of service providers and by consequence, reducing costs (Parks et al. 1981; Brudney and England 1983; Levine and Fisher 1984). Nevertheless, the operationalisation of co-production within the NPM has been problematic for four reasons. First, while co-production had traditionally been forwarded as a means of empowerment (Alford 2002; Pestoff 2014; Nabatchi et al. 2017), the differentiation made between service users and public managers within the NPM served to reinforce a power imbalance that favoured the latter. As consumers, individuals have limited opportunity to participate in or influence largely closed systems of decision-making, which are occupied by professionals whose specialist knowledge/skill position them as experts (Jung 2010; Haikio 2010; Fotaki 2011). Professionals may therefore resent or even resist the inclusion of service users in the production

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process, particularly when it is deemed disruptive to effective managerial practice, or where they fear loss of control and professional expertise becomes devalued by consequence (Pestoff 2006; Bovaird 2007; Flemig and Osborne 2019). Second, when co-production has taken place, it has been criticised as a mechanism of managerial control, whereby service users are co-opted into the service production process as a way of endorsing pre-made decisions (Timney 1998; Pestoff 2012). The third challenge is the potentially inequitable application of co-production. Opportunities for co-production may be closed to certain disadvantaged groups who lack knowledge, information and resources which support participation (Jakobsen and Andersen 2013). Finally, the NPM has been criticised for embracing a ‘product-dominant logic’, where public services are treated like manufactured goods which are designed and produced by service professionals in isolation and consumed separately by consumers (Dunston et al. 2009; Osborne et al. 2013). Here, production and consumption are conceptualised as discrete processes and consumers play a passive role which can be extended, by invitation, to the process of service production (Alford 2016). This suggests that the process of co-production is not central to service production but rather, appended to it, and is controlled by public service staff in terms of its nature, reach and impact (Osborne and Strokosch 2013). Public Value (PV) emerged as an alternative to the NPM, with the seminal work of Moore (1995) who developed a model for strategy development for public managers. Since then, it has evolved into a diverse narrative, emphasising variously public service improvement (Benington 2011), a management style (Stoker 2006) and a governance framework (Bryson et al. 2015). This broad PV narrative offers a collaborative approach to public service production with the aim of creating ‘public value’ (O’Flynn 2007; Bryson et al. 2014) and to support this, participation is defined as a key component of public service delivery (Benington 2011). PV suggests two forms of participation: political interaction through networks of deliberation and dialogue between government and civil society (Bozeman 2002; Bryson et al. 2014), and co-production during service delivery (Alford 2009; Benington 2011). Here, co-production is articulated as being founded upon trust, cooperation and compliance whereby public service users not only consume services but may also contribute to and influence ‘positive actions to collective purposes’ (Bozeman 2002, 344). In contrast to the consumer-focus of the NPM, PV reconceptualises the ‘citizen’ as active, participative and responsible (Bryson et al. 2014). However, there is a continued emphasis on the role of public managers, who are defined as creative entrepreneurs and as ideally placed to create public value outcomes (Moore 1995; Bryson et al. 2014). The government is described as fulfilling a special role as ‘guarantor of public values’, which leads Bryson et al. (2014) to argue that responsibility for creating value is shared between elected officials, public managers and citizen co-producers.

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PV, in its various forms, has been widely critiqued (e.g. Jorgensen and Bozeman 2007; Morrell 2009) with three criticisms relating specifically to co-production. First, advocates of PV are said to have ignored the closed institutional design of PSOs, which forms a significant barrier to co-production and its potential contribution to the design and delivery of public services (Shaw 2013; Yang 2016). Second, PV has been criticised for neglecting dominant power asymmetries which favour public managers/professionals (Rhodes and Wanna 2007; Morrell 2009; Williams and Shearer 2011). Third, the emphasis on the value-creating potential of public managers and the involvement of organised groups have been criticised for neglecting a more inclusive formulation of the public interest (Shaw 2013; Dahl and Soss 2014; Jacobs 2014). Finally, PV has been critiqued for its normative focus, emphasising the process of participation as valuable in itself (Brannan et al. 2006) but overlooking both the potential importance of other relationships critical to value creation and its potential to destroy value (Meynhardt 2009; Williams et al. 2016). The New Public Service (NPS) originated from the United States in the early 2000s as a critique of the NPM, led predominantly by the work of Denhardt and Denhardt (2000, 2015a). It is underpinned by three theoretical perspectives: democratic citizenship, which demands greater citizen activeness and involvement; models of community and civil society; and organizational humanism and discourse theory with a focus on the needs/preferences of citizens (Denhardt and Denhardt 2015b). Central to the NPS are collaboration and partnership through an open and accessible system of governance, and where citizens play a crucial role throughout the entire public service cycle (Denhardt and Denhardt 2000; Brainard and McNutt 2010). According to NPS scholars, government is responsible for enabling collaboration and participation through the establishment of deliberative structures (Jun and Bryer 2017). Public managers therefore play a principal role as ‘transformative leaders’, who foster active citizenship through dialogue and citizen empowerment (Denhardt and Denhardt 2000; Denhardt and Campbell 2006). Their role is supported by structural changes through new systems of accountability and deliberative processes, which are argued to institutionalise active citizenship (deLeon and Denhardt 2000; Jun and Bryer 2017). Within the NPS narrative, co-production emphasises relationships of mutual trust, cooperation and shared responsibility for public service production (Denhardt and Denhardt 2015a). The aim of co-production therefore shifts from the economic rationale outlined by the NPM, towards its potential to enhance citizenship by establishing a more positive relationship between government and citizens. Within this relationship, the consumers (of NPM) are transformed to citizens who have a shared vision of ‘public interest’ and who are required to develop knowledge of public affairs, a renewed sense of civic pride and a concern for shared interests (deLeon and Denhardt 2000; Denhardt and Denhardt 2003). In this way, the NPS, suggests a ‘virtuous circle’; co-production is of intrinsic value to individuals, leading to their taking

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greater civic responsibility for the public services received and which in turn, catalyses further participation (Denhardt and Denhardt 2015a). Four criticisms of co-production within the NPS narrative have emerged. First, the NPS is argued to be positioned normatively as a riposte to the NPM and as such, it is not based in empirically supported evidence (Bryson et al. 2014). Thus, the conceptualisation of co-production functioning within a ‘virtuous circle’ has not been substantiated by research. Second, reforms under the NPS have focused predominantly on structural changes and have arguably provided an oversimplification of how co-production might take a more prominent place in public service reform (Fischer 2006). Third, the NPS argument that participation should be institutionalised is problematic because it assumes that every citizen has a latent desire for participation that can be awakened, but it is unclear whether all citizens have the time or even the inclination for co-production (Pestoff 2012; Williams et al. 2016). Finally, it has been questioned whether the position of public managers as ‘transformative leaders’ actually reinforces existing power asymmetries—in practice whether and how much power can be transferred through co-production is controlled by public service staff and can therefore vary widely (Strokosch 2019). The New Public Governance (NPG) builds on organisational sociology and network theory to reflect the impact upon public management of organisational network governance and collaboration (Osborne 2006). Similar to PV and NPS, the NPG arose as a response to the challenges and critiques of the NPM. The collaborative focus of the NPG has been framed under two distinct streams of work. The first discussed ‘collaborative governance’ where various actors from across the public, for-profit and third sectors worked in cooperative relationships to achieve consensus in decision-making (Ansell and Gash 2007; Sorensen and Torfing 2018). The second integrated and repositioned the existing debate on co-production. This latter interest in coproduction has been against a backdrop of budgetary challenges and questions over the capacity of market-led reforms to transform public services (Clark et al. 2013). Within the NPG literature, consumers have been reconceptualised as co-producers, who work in horizontal, interactive and co-operative relationships with organisations producing public services (Pestoff 2012; Meijer 2016). As co-producers, they are defined as contributing valuable knowledge, skills and resources to the service production process (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012; Thomsen 2017). The role of public service staff in co-production is thus twofold; they both facilitate and participate in the co-production during public service delivery (Pestoff 2006; Sicilia et al. 2016). Within the NPG narrative, co-production, has been celebrated as a revolutionary solution to public service reform, offering a means for service improvement and innovation (Clark et al. 2013; Dunston et al. 2009; Meijer 2011; Verschuere et al. 2012; Thomsen 2017). However, critics have directed

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three important criticisms at the role of co-production within the NPG narrative. First, co-production is argued to be restricted to service delivery only. By consequence, citizens may have limited opportunities to co-produce during service design and planning which have remained the responsibility of public service staff and reinforces the likelihood of closed decision-making (Thomsen 2017). Second, the inclusivity of co-production has been questioned. While the NPG advocates greater pluralism of actors working in collaboration, empirical studies have suggested that in practice, increased citizen participation has not necessarily been the result (Walti et al. 2004; Greenaway et al. 2007). Finally, the NPG has been criticised for failing to overcome the enduring power imbalance between public managers and service users discussed previously. Service users continue to be conceptualised as ‘lay people’ within the NPG discourse (see for example, Nabatchi et al. 2017) who can co-produce only when permitted to by public managers or by those sitting in control of public service delivery networks (Hendricks and Tops 1999; Bovaird 2007; Alford 2009). Because its application is controlled, co-production has therefore often been employed as a management tool to retain and strengthen the power of professional staff as opposed to public service users.

Co-production from the Public Service Logic Perspective The aim here is not to devalue the extant literature on co-production, which has offered valuable insight into how co-production can be extended through various participative mechanisms and its enablers and barriers in practice (e.g. Parks et al. 1981; Brandsen and Pestoff 2006; Bovaird 2007; Alford 2009). What it is missing, however, is a holistic understanding of the different ways citizens participate during public service production, and their implications for value creation. Building on this conjecture, co-production has subsequently been analysed and developed within the Public Service Logic (PSL) framework (Osborne et al. 2016; Osborne 2018). PSL draws on service management theory, and particularly the work of Gronroos (2019), to emphasise the importance of value and the processes through which it is created or destroyed. It has identified five domains of value that can be created/destroyed through public service delivery—short-term satisfaction and mood, longer-term effects and impacts (outcomes), whole life experience, capacity creation and public value (Osborne, in press). PSL posits that citizens have a fundamental role to play in creating value for themselves and wider society and importantly, that this role is enabled through four distinct processes of participation—of which coproduction is one. This is significant because it extends the traditional view of participation which dominates much of the co-production literature through the development of a more holistic conceptualisation, which differentiates two intrinsic (co-experience and co-construction) and two extrinsic (co-production

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and co-design) processes of participation. The intrinsic elements are an inalienable part of public service delivery—they cannot be chosen, but are rather embedded in the service delivery process. The extrinsic elements require agency—the parties to public service delivery can choose whether to engage in them or not. Co-experience concerns the way that value is created during the use and experience of the service and therefore, includes both short-term satisfaction and mood, as well as longer-term outcomes for service users (including the impact of the service upon their social and economic needs). This is a development of the service management concept ‘value-in-use’ (Gronroos and Voima 2013; Osborne 2018). PSL argues that value is created in the cauldron of what Normann (1991) has called the ‘moment of truth’ where service user and service provider interact at the point of service delivery. Gronroos and Voima (2013) argue that service users, as individuals, are always the focal point of this process—service providers offer resources but it is how service users interact with them that creates or destroys value. Co-construction refers to the two-way process of public service delivery. On the one hand, the existing experiences and expectations of service users (and their interactions with family/friends about these experiences and expectations) frame the value and outcomes that they can derive from service delivery. On the other hand, the process of service delivery (especially in the human services that are invasive into large parts of a user’s life) will change and construct not only their expectations of service delivery in the future but also their whole-life experience. Drawing again on service theory this is related to ‘value-in-context’ (Vargo and Lusch 2008). This posits that PSOs offer resources to service users, but it is how these users combine these with their needs and experiences that creates, or destroys, value for them. PSL defines co-production as the active and voluntary involvement of the citizens in the management and delivery of public services alongside public service staff. It is hence an extrinsic form of participation, controlled by public service staff who influence its formulation, implementation and transformative impact. The PSO therefore actively drives the value co-creation process by inviting service users to engage in service production through co-production (Gronroos 2019). Importantly, PSL also recognises that co-production can also destroy value where relationships are not effectively managed (Williams et al. 2016). Co-design refers to the active involvement of citizens in improving existing services and in innovating new forms of public service delivery. Its operationalisation can take a more embedded form than co-production, although it is again an extrinsic process which is controlled by PSOs in terms of its application and impact. Co-design builds on the inseparability of the coexperience process to develop and innovate services through a partnership approach (Radnor et al. 2014). The assumption underpinning co-design is that service users are uniquely positioned to design services given their lived experience of services.

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Significantly, Osborne (in press) argues that both these extrinsic processes can create ‘value-in-production’ for service users. Private sector service management theory has latterly argued that value is only created through the use and consumption of a service, not through its production or coproduction (Vargo and Lusch 2008). PSL though argues that co-production and co-design can create value, as ‘value-in-production’. This is because the actual process for service users of being involved in co-production and codesign can create value: it may enhance their self-worth, create new skills and capacity for them for the future, and impact upon the achievement of the outcomes of a public service (Osborne, in press). PSL thus develops a clear holistic understanding of co-production and its role in public service delivery and the creation/destruction of value for public service users. As such, it is an important development in our understanding of co-production, its contribution to effective public services, and its potential for transformative change.

Conclusions and Implications This chapter has argued that despite sustained interest in co-production in public administration and management theory and research, its potential for transformative change has been constrained for three predominant reasons. First, the varied framing of co-production across the four narratives of public service reform identified above has failed to overcome the enduring power imbalance that favours public managers and professionals. While PV, NPS and NPG have been positioned predominantly as criticisms of the NPM, none has moved beyond an understanding of co-production as being an ‘addon’ to public service delivery. Nor have any of them convincingly addressed the hegemony of public service staff in the service delivery process and the power imbalances that this implies. Second, and linked to this, the institutional barriers to co-production have proven difficult to permeate in any of these management narratives. Co-production is appended to service production and by consequence, its transformative potential is controlled by public service staff and requires voluntary agency on the part of citizens (Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Strokosch 2019). Co-production has thus been framed as an extrinsic process of participation which may be designed into service production by those in power. Finally, co-production has been positioned normatively, particularly within PV and the NPS which emphasise the process of participation as valuable in itself (Brannan et al. 2006; Denhardt and Denhardt 2015a) and as an alternative to the failings of the NPM. The problem with such normative positioning is that this fails to account for, or understand, the potential of coproduction to destroy value in the lives of services users, as well as to create it.

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This chapter has subsequently offered PSL as an alternative understanding of the role of the citizen and public service user in the processes of public service delivery. It emphasises the importance of intrinsic modes of participation through the service experience (co-experience) and the contextualisation of services within individuals’ own lives (co-construction) as well as the extrinsic modes of participation (co-production and co-design). All these have the potential to create (or destroy) value for public service users, as value-in-use, value-in-context and value-in-production. These intrinsic and extrinsic processes of participation imply an interactive dynamic between the user and public service staff, particularly during co-experience, co-production and co-design. Importantly then, value creation is a variable outcome of coproduction not a normative assumption. As such, PSL lays bare the power and resource dynamics that impact upon these value creation/destruction processes. PSL stresses the contingent nature of co-production and situates the participation of the service user and their experience of service delivery at the crux of the value creation process. This marks an important departure in the conceptualisation of public service delivery. Furthermore, it argues that value creation is not enacted by PSOs and their staff alone, as has been suggested within each of the four other narratives of public service reform above, but is rather created and co-created through service encounters and by public service users in the context of their own lives. PSL has four implications for co-production in practice. First, the effective management of service encounters is fundamental to value creation due to the intrinsic nature of participation during service delivery. Public service staff therefore need time and space to effectively engage with and fully understand not only service users’ needs, but also their experiences and expectations. Likewise, service users require time and space to engage with service staff and this forms the second implication for practice. Engaging with staff enables service user access to important competencies and resources, which may be utilised to support their navigation of the service system and also meet their service needs. Relationship building between service staff and service users is therefore a potentially key dimension supporting value creation during service encounters. Third, public service staff also require to develop the skills to understand and facilitate value creation. This shifts the process from the technical design of ‘public services’ and to the creation of resources to be used in the context of the lives of service users and co-creation, by offering propositions which can ultimately co-create value. Finally, a pragmatic and nuanced approach to the extrinsic processes of value creation is necessary, rather than a blanket and ‘one size fits all’ application of co-production and co-design—and one that recognises that value can also be destroyed as well as created through the delivery (and co-production) of public services.

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Acknowledgements This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 770356. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use, which may be made of the information contained therein.

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CHAPTER 7

Understanding Co-production as a Social Innovation Adalbert Evers and Benjamin Ewert

Introduction In this chapter co-productive services are addressed through the lens of social innovation. As a like-minded concept social innovation has much in common with co-production. Foremost, both concepts share a common aspiration to a somehow better (i.e. more social, democratic and egalitarian) society. It is no coincidence that almost all social innovations are in one way or another ‘coproductive’ by fostering ‘new social relationships or collaborations’ (Murray et al. 2010, 3); vice versa, many co-productive services could be labelled as prototypes of ‘innovation in public service delivery’ (Osborne et al. 2016, 648). Taking this conceptual affinity as a starting point, we provide lessons the current debate on co-production may learn from social innovation research. It is not obvious to do so. As we will argue, basically all personal social services are defined by kind of co-productive arrangements, where the service and the quality of the outcome depend to some degree and in some ways from the contributions of the service users. However, from history one knows that the ways to reach a co-productive relationship can be manifold, reaching from freely chosen respectful cooperation over to enforced compliance. The coproduction debate as it evolved in recent years and as it gets presented in this handbook is characterised by a basic orientation that wants these relations, the A. Evers (B) Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] B. Ewert Department of Social Science, Siegen University, Siegen, Germany © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_7

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respective culture of personal services and their governance to be associated with such hallmarks as democracy, personal rights, respect and empowerment. While we fully support such a pleasant interpretation of co-production we see a tension between co-production as it should be with much of the past and present of service systems as we know them. There is a heritage of service systems and practices not marked by such values. And the values of the coproduction debate are certainly not at the forefront of the prevailing changes and reforms of service systems. We will start by clarifying this in the next section. However, the wide service landscape is not uniform and there are localities, settings and networks where one finds new attempts towards more co-productive services in terms such as those just mentioned, making a difference to much of what prevails in the past and present of service systems and policies—social innovations. In the following section we sketch briefly the meaning of this label that has become a key notion in the debates about how societies find the power to change. Generalising findings from analyses and case-studies of social service innovations, we will then present what could be seen as central innovative hallmarks of more co-productive service systems. In the penultimate section we will deal with the challenge of mainstreaming such social innovations, i.e. of framing co-production as an innovative process. Good governance appears there as being much dependent on the abilities of public policies to operate with a kind of democratic experimentalism, in touch with or even endorsing social innovations. This is about a fair interplay between the proponents of innovative blueprints, the public and policy makers.

Discerning Two Different Meanings of ‘Co-production’ The label ‘co-production’ can be used in two very different ways. One way to understand this notion would use it as an ‘empty signifier’. Here, co-production signifies, that in any personal service, the social services are characterised by a relationship between service providers and service users, wherein both sides have to relate, contribute and exchange something. For example, in the case of severe illness the recovery depends on an interaction between medical professionals and patients that works someway and somehow. This holds true on the level of the individual relationship between professionals and users but as well on the level of the services systems and organisations that frame such personal services. The way these interactions are embedded in welfare governance systems and related to policy rationales represent as well kinds of relations between those that operate the systems and those that are related to them as service users and citizens with rights and some degree of influence on their design and legitimacy. If we speak here about an ‘empty’ signifier, it is because co-production, while (different to products)

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being in general significant for service relations, is a basic trait that can take very different forms. In technology-based services co-production, for example, increasingly refers to the interaction between humans and digital devices (e.g. smart homes and technology assisted healthcare). The same holds true for specific forms of digitalisation such as commercial health apps that turn customers’ coproduction (i.e. in this case the voluntary sharing of health data) into a lucrative business model. In these and other examples of today’s service landscapes co-production is framed as an indispensable approach to govern pluralist societies whose members are more demanding concerning service quality and participation. Putting it differently: Co-production signifies all kind of service relations and systems (and their difference to products). Claiming the opposite—i.e. service relationships that are just based on command, control and good management of users whose contributions are assumed to be ‘free at the point of use’—would not only be anachronistic but a strategic non-starter in today’s welfare governance landscape. In consequence, it is an indispensable task to qualify (different) concepts of co-production. This can be illustrated by two opposite approaches to activate the long-term unemployed, i.e. fairly rigid workfare programmes pushing jobseekers into paid labour and, as an antidote, person-centred work integration schemes (Lindsay et al. 2019) taking people’s skills and resources as a starting point. Obviously, both approaches require coproductive relationships; however, while workfare programmes are executed at arms’ length from governments in order to restore compliance in service relationships by ‘mining resources’ (Glimmerveen et al. 2018) from co-producers, socially innovative work integration schemes have not only much more operational leeway but are also aligned to a broader set of policy rationales (e.g. empowerment and re-education). However, both examples of co-production may converge over time. For example, apparently progressive approaches such as shared decision-making between doctors and their patients may become a refined strategy of the former to achieve compliance of the latter. Hence the challenge would be to describe what kind of co-production is meant once the label is used beyond distinguishing services from products. Analysing the specific framing of co-productive relationships is therefore a prerequisite to understand better the challenges entailed in co-production. In fact, it is this that has been tried in most of the contributions to the co-production debate in the last decade. In the main contributions (see e.g. Bovaird and Loeffler 2012; Brandsen and Honingh 2016; Durose and Richardson 2015; Nabatchi et al. 2017) key words for qualifying the correlation between professionals and users are ‘co-saying’ and ‘co-decision-making’ and key words for the relationships between service-systems and users and citizens are ‘co-planning’ and ‘co-designing’. Civic hallmarks such as democracy, equality and fairness, help to qualify and determine to some degree a specific understanding and concept of co-production—an orientation that the authors of this paper support. Qualifying this way by general terms the kind of coproduction to which one is referring, helps in making a difference to other

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concepts of co-production as they express, e.g. in terms such as ‘compliance’. It leaves however much room both with respect to issues of how to concretise such wide and general orientations for services and systems and with respect to the feasibility of such concepts, depending from history, present situation and trends that dominate system change. In the following we will deal with co-production, understood in the second way—as a qualified and value-based kind of new service and governance mode, different from other competing concepts practices and notions. And it is here that challenges become clearer: The very notions so nicely sketched in the present co-production debate are so far the ‘exception to the rule’ and not what present changes underway are bringing about. Citizen empowerment and supportive service relations at eye level are not mainstream features of service provision. The proliferation of such a notion of co-production is hindered by multiple barriers (Bartels 2017). Resistance comes not only from welfare systems’ heritage—e.g. paternalistic professionals and impersonal bureaucracies—but also from economic recessions and austerity policies. In the aftermath of the financial crisis more than a decade ago ‘welfare modernization’ has become a kind of synonym for ‘doing more with less’ (Cunningham 2016; Pape et al. 2016). Consequently, social services have either been cut back or relabelled as a kind of emergency aid or philanthropic support—think, for example, of the dramatic spreading of foodbanks (Garthwaite 2016). In such a disempowering social climate a progressive notion of co-production receives hardly any considerable structural and political support. Hence, under the primacy of economic rationalisation social policies are difficult to reconcile with a thick (i.e. more social and democratic) version of co-production. In retrenched welfare states citizens’ possibilities to co-design the conditions under which their co-production activities should take place are very limited—at least with regard to the mainstream of social services. As indicated, most activation policies in the employment sector are typical examples of ‘coerced co-production’ (Alford 2009, 22) that have not much in common with the values and aspirations the authors in this handbook attach to the notion of co-production. Summing up, we have argued that there are two different understandings of co-production, with the first one signifying a hallmark of all personal services and the second one signifying (different) qualified, value-based concepts of how to arrange co-production. The difference between the two notions is not always clear and it is much for this reason that the co-production debate suffers from an in-built fuzziness and intangibility (see Ewert and Evers 2012). From what has been argued so far, two points follow that are both about the importance of bringing the notion of ‘social innovation’ into the co-production debate.

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• First of all, the significance of a qualified and value-based notion of coproduction depends largely on the ability to show, by which kind of different service relationships, arrangements and practices co-productive services are taking shape—in environments that are in many aspects not supportive, even though liberal democracies and welfare states offer chances. What do social innovations tell us in concrete terms about a more social and democratic co-producing in personal services? • Secondly, changing service systems in such a direction is not only a question of party politics and the pressure of votes but also a matter of the readiness to take up what is offered by new initiatives and experiments, as they can be found in the large and diversified service landscape. What kind of interaction between governments and the proponents of innovative approaches would support the mainstreaming of those kinds of co-production that are sketched in this chapter and the handbook overall?

Co-production as a Social Innovation It has been argued that the kinds of co-production that aim at giving users of service systems more say beyond consumer choice and voting, and that make use of a wide set of individual and collective kinds of participation, do not go with the mainstream. They represent in some ways a kind of culture change that cannot be introduced top-down. Therefore, we suggest, that the most appropriate way for understanding them is to frame them as a special kind of social innovation. The co-production debate can benefit from being framed as a debate on a special kind of social innovation, because in that framework it is easier to raise questions about what the specific concern with more coproductive services has in common with the search for new innovatory paths in other social and policy fields and with the concern for social change at large. However, like co-production, social innovation can be defined in various ways. We want in the following to sketch what we see as essential points of our reading. First of all: What makes up for a social innovation and why can it frame concepts of more co-productive services that try to make a difference to prevailing concepts of change and innovation in service systems? The term innovation is usually applied to those developments on technical, industrial but also on social, political and institutional levels, that can be seen as ‘path-breaking’, not simply pursuing or modernising given products, services, developments and their configurations (Phills 2008). Not every element of an innovative construct or concept must be new. Often innovations result from new kinds of links, connections or assemblages of elements already known (Johnson 2010). Innovations are to considerable degrees both disruptive with respect to inherited orders and constructive when it comes to supplement or substitute former products and arrangements. And so are many concepts and practices of co-production.

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When it comes to social goals and characteristics of co-production there is a wide agreement that the adjective ‘social’ marks the difference from all kind of technical and industry innovations, which may have considerable social (side)effects but which are not however guided by attempts to change societal relations in the first line. This may, for example, be illustrated by the difference between digitalisation of services as an innovation and those projects that take up the challenge of using new digital tools for social innovation defined by the purpose to bring about rearrangements of social services that allow their addressees to become co-producers. Furthermore, we take the view that social innovations are about not only intentions and ideas but also practical organisational constructs; together they make a difference to what is hitherto prevailing. Existing research points to the fact that the proponents of local innovations that have to work here and now and which may be modest in terms of their immediate impact (‘act local’) are often implying concerns and utopias (‘think global’) that guide and motivate them. It is in that spirit that they are trying to develop new offers and procedures (Evers and Brandsen 2016). Social innovations in the field of environmental concerns, but also with respect to more user-friendly co-productive services, might illustrate that. Hence social innovations can be seen as a kind of unfinished work, entailing messages that question wider social and political systems and their dominating discourse. This means that social innovations are not only about reorganisation of a single service provision but also express concerns with the institutional frameworks of thinking, decision-making and management which lie behind that service, reaching from professional identities and management over to (service) systems and their governance. There has been much debate concerning the links of social innovations with actors and movements from the social sphere of society, i.e. civil society. Some positions claim that in principle social innovations can spring from various realms, be it the business sector, governments and administrations as well as from civil society, its social movements and organisations (Mulgan 2019). In other approaches, the link with civil society actors is a prior hallmark of social innovations up to the point where they are seen as a constructive expression of social movements (Unger 1998; Moulaert 2010). However, todays’ movements, like environmentalism or the search for different healthier and more sustainable lifestyles, with their implications for public and private services, have their proponents across sectors, not only in civil society but also in public institutions and even in market sectors. Yet there are good reasons to state, that as Anheier et al. (2018, 14) put it, ‘non-profits are “better” at social innovations than governments and markets’. The same may be said about social innovations in favour of more co-productive services. Secondly: An additional way of inserting co-production into the framework of a social innovation debate has to do with conceiving social innovation as a process, with the dynamics and the factors that mould and direct it: How can

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new concepts and practices diffuse, coexist with the mainstream, influence or even redefine it? Early approaches to social innovation have drawn upon the concept of an innovation cycle (Murray et al. 2010, 11). There are various conceptualisations of this cycle or ‘spiral’ (Mulgan 2019, 15). While they offer a useful conceptual tool, in practice, innovations such as a co-productive turn in personal services may be blocked at one of the stages. In addition, one may raise questions about the sustainability of the qualities that characterised the initial ‘products’, the intentions about how to grow and scale the innovation, and the final balance between ‘changing systems’ and being changed by them. Thereby an innovative co-productive attempt, co-designed by the users, may be turned later into a pilot project, designed by the government. A social innovation may be successfully diffused or remain limited to communities where it either serves a real need or turns out to have no further use at all. What factors determine the spread of social innovations, the selectivity of acceptance and the kinds of support they get? The political and administrative system and the politicians in charge may deal with them in different ways, from rejection or partial acceptance all the way to various ways of integrating innovative projects into discourses, institutions and politics. Such journeys of social innovations from their starting points at single service spots into public service systems and the mainstreams of society have risks and potentials, which change the roles and meanings of a social innovation in different ways. The journey may work foremost as a contribution towards redefining the socio-cultural and democratic qualities of service systems, their administration and governance. However, it may also mean losing the qualities and the links with the intentions that had brought about the respective innovation. Putting it in a nutshell, discussing co-production as a kind of social innovation means raising concerns with the ways and degrees it challenges established institutions and paths of development. In the following sections we will deal with two interrelated aspects and questions: • What are the changes in the social design and culture of co-productive services that qualify them as social innovations, i.e. as contributions to a ‘better’ more just and inclusive society? • What about social innovation as a process? What are those key factors in its interplay with institutionalised politics that result in kinds of co-productive services changing system mainstreams rather than being assimilated to them?

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Hallmarks of Social Innovation in Co-productive Services According to Bovaird and Loeffler (2012, 5) co-productive services are about ‘professionals and citizens making better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes and/or improved efficiency’. In the real world of personal and social services changes that follow such a well-intended reading of co-production are—unfortunately—still the exception. They are innovations against the tide rather than its forerunners. There is much evidence, that in these days personal and social services get in many ways dehumanised due to permanent economic pressure and kinds of managerial modernisation (Pape et al. 2016). The co-productive role of service users is mainly enhanced by creating new forms of compliance (for an overview on such tendencies see Bode 2019). Against this gloomy outlook a progressive and truly empowering notion of co-productive services is a much welcome silver lining. However, there remains the question of how to get to a service design that supports such an interpretation of what co-production should be all about. We argue that if co-production should actually become a powerful vehicle for democratising social services, instead of being merely an empty signifier, social innovations deserve more attention and space in the academic debate on co-production. Therefore, we will highlight five hallmarks of recurring innovative features shared by many of the attempts at making social services more co-productive (see the more detailed listing in Evers and Ewert 2016, 112). Like the additional points in the next section and most of the illustrative examples given here, they are based on an assessment of case studies undertaken in two major FP-7 EU transnational research projects, INNOSERV (Langer et al. 2019) and WILCO (Brandsen et al. 2016). Personalised Packages of Services—Crossing Silos and Sectors ‘[T]o give citizens more control over the design of the services they personally receive’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 433) is a basic feature of coproduction. While it may be right to facilitate user participation at the level of service design in order to make services more responsive and needs-tailored, there are many people who are in need of personal guidance at a much earlier stage. Especially most vulnerable users with multiple needs for social support (i.e. chronically ill patients, refugees) often despair due to the thicket of services and contact points that are dispersed across welfare sectors. Being exhausted from ‘flitting about’ between siloed systems that may help them to solve one problem but are helpless concerning many others, these people are in need of personalised service packages. The latter could be perceived as a kind of necessary ‘meta-support’ in order to be able to benefit from single services. Many social innovations seek to increase the user-friendliness of welfare systems by making service interfaces more intuitive. Service innovations that address the ‘whole person’, even if this is a somewhat hackneyed

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notion, require co-productive relationships in the best sense of the concept (Durose and Richardson 2015). Ideally, co-producers’ needs are reflected in a decidedly individual perspective that follows from the answers to two simple questions: What kind of support do you need? and What capabilities do you have? Needs-tailored and capability-oriented service packages that combine support from different policy fields help many target groups from the longterm unemployed, single parents to residents in deprived neighbourhoods (Evers et al. 2014). Most recently, they proved to be particularly important in the social support for migrants and refugees. Just one example among many is the MAMBA network in the city of Münster (Germany) that seeks to facilitate migrants and refugees’ labour market integration (for more detailed information, see Boadu et al. 2014). This mission is accomplished by the combination of jointly developed and case-based employment services that complement support of all kinds for local social integration (i.e. in terms of housing, health and child care). Overall, the success of co-productive relationships in the case of MAMBA emanates from established networks of service providers and professionals, cooperating in an unbureaucratic manner, that have the capability to match support seekers’ resources with local opportunity structures. Bridging the Gaps—Intermediating Experts’ and Peoples’ Life Worlds Within pluralist and multicultural societies the promise of universal welfare services appears increasingly outdated: For example, in European cities with a large Muslim citizenry, schools have to adapt school life to Ramadan (e.g. by postponing school and sport festivals), otherwise schools would ignore the way of life of many of their students and, thereby, cause damage to the foundations of future co-production. The same holds true for welfare branches in which conventional service arrangements and remote professionals are losing touch with people’s reality. Social innovation research has shown that cultural, spatial and social gaps between the welfare system and citizens could be reduced and sometimes bridged by outreach counselling and localised service offers (Evers and Ewert 2016). Recurrent features of respective service innovations are intermediating experts and mentoring programmes. Such approaches seek for ‘synergy of expertise’ (Durose and Richardson 2015) by taking citizens’ expertise by experience as an asset for service co-production. Respective examples range from migrants that support peers on their road to integration (see e.g. the renowned example of ‘neighbourhood mothers’, Evers et al. 2014, 124), self-employed entrepreneurs that advise job seekers on realising their own business ideas, to expert patients that provide emotional backing to other patients and help them to navigate through complex clinical pathways.

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Family and Community—Acknowledging Ties That Can Bind and Support Modern welfare systems seek to untie people from various burdens that hamper individual development, be it traditional family structures, discouraging social milieus or other paternalistic settings. On the other hand, contemporary social infrastructures are in peril of losing former elements of solidarity and a sense of community. If the promise of personalisation and tailor-made services becomes a shorthand for people’s singularisation within largely anonymous systems, the ‘social’ dimension of services is difficult to maintain. This also concerns the nature of co-productive relations in consumerist service landscapes that tend to be reduced to mere choice-making acts, as is the case in the selection of tailored healthcare insurance packages (Ewert and Evers 2012). Against this backdrop of professional but often impersonal services, social innovations may contribute to people’s social embeddedness through ties that are supportive—an approach that is, for example, pursued by ‘Frieda’ a women centre in Berlin’s district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (see also Ewert 2016). At first glance, women seem to benefit from the extension of childcare and other family-minded services in Germany within recent years. However, the rough picture is deceptive, since cultural changes that are necessary for gender equality are still pending. Frieda takes this unfinished business as a starting point to empower women through advocacy, solidarity and mutual help. As it is stated in Frieda’s self-conception, women are perceived as experts in their own life worlds, whose various resources should be taken up to jointly discover personal strengths. In sharp contrast to conventional service agencies, Frieda commits itself to partisanship for women’s affairs and, therefore, frequently chimes in on local debates on social and political issues such as the gender pay gap or stalking, in order to improve the overall situation for women in the district. Summing up, the centre establishes an inclusive and locally rooted version of co-productive relationships that go far beyond usual service relations. Rebalancing Protection and Empowerment According to a shortened and fairly linear narrative, co-production is the progressive answer to a paternalistic welfare heritage that guaranteed some degree of social protection in return of citizens’ compliancy. This story is typically exemplified by referring to the step-wise modernisation of doctor–patient relationships—from humble loyalty towards all-mighty medical professions to co-production and shared-decision-making. While this development reflects reality by and large—many patients have become lay experts and are no longer willing to unquestioningly follow doctors’ advice—it tends to eclipse new constraints and protection needs. Among them are, in particular, economic constraints, complex service systems, the difficulty of becoming health literate due to the sheer quantity of health-related knowledge available in the internet but also due to the fact that under austerity conditions health professionals

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have to restrict their time budget for dialogue and human care. These constraints are not recognised as fundamental barriers to co-production yet. There is a tendency to downgrade the issue of protection as a special concern of less health- and service-literate groups, instead of understanding this issue— ranging from consumers’ rights to patient safety—as a general concern across the fields of services and customers. So, what does it take to rebalance protection and empowerment as a basis for co-production? While standardised healthcare systems leave very little space for social—in contrast to technological—innovations, there are a few provision schemes that follow different paths. Substantial co-productive relations seem to be more likely at the edge of the healthcare system: the field of palliative and end-of-life care. Almost ironically, there is greater willingness to re-humanise healthcare (Hannah 2014), if patients’ cure is impossible. Hence, lessons could be learned from local role models of integrated palliative care across Europe. In order to fulfil their mission—i.e. ‘[e]nabling patients to stay at home until death’ (Van Beek et al. 2016, 15)—these initiatives insulate patients and their families from standardised care procedures such as in hospitals. Due to a holistic approach that is not only marked by respect and dignity but strictly focused on patients’ physical and psychosocial needs that includes the relief of family members, patients ‘feel treated as persons, not as numbers’ (Hasselaar and Payne 2016, 49). It is in such settings, that co-production comes close to its ideal of deliberation and shared decisions within a protected space. Rights and Responsibilities—Social Contracts for Co-production In recent years the dictum ‘no rights without responsibilities’ has stood for a rather technocratic concept of co-production that is primarily based on control and merely to a lesser degree on mutual trust. In the face of an emerging ‘social investment state’ (Busemeyer et al. 2018) with reduced unconditional ‘flat-rate’ benefits, citizens’ obligations to cooperate have been re-emphasised. A typical example in this respect is workfare and activation policies, as they have been implemented, for example, by the German labour market reform at the beginning of the 2000s. In accordance of the now famous motto Fördern und Fordern (support and demand) the latter enforced compliant behaviour of job seekers with the help of so-called integration agreements. These contracts are usually not concluded on a voluntary basis but under the permanent threat of sanctions by employment agencies. Unsurprisingly, this is not the kind of co-productive relations that social innovators believe in. Therefore, innovative welfare schemes rebalance rights and responsibilities in a more fruitful way that is based on renewed social contracts. A timely example is the Germany-wide project ‘Wohnen für Hilfe’ (Housing for help) that responded creatively to the problem of rising rents in cities. Initiated by a federal association of the same name, the project matches people with available living space to apartment seekers who are socially committed in one way or the other. So far, so-called housing partnerships have been realised in 34 German cities under

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the local management of municipal institutions, welfare associations or nonprofit organisations. As a rule, those who are in need of housing are committed to contribute one hour voluntary work per month—ranging from gardening work to child care or joint activities—for the equivalent of one square metre of living space. Hence, a 20 square metre student flat is available for 20 hours of voluntary work. However, precise arrangements are regulated within a cooperation contract between both parties. Besides matches between elderly people and students—the most typical matches—housing partnerships may also be established between other target groups. In each case, those building a match will be informed, advised and, if wished for, professionally assisted for the time of the agreed housing partnership period. After recapitulating hallmarks of social innovation in co-productive services, the next section will turn to the diffusion, mainstreaming and governance of innovative concepts for co-production.

Framing Co-production as an Innovatory Process: The Interaction of Social Innovations and Politics Social change by (social) innovations is often conceived in two ways. One is to take it as a process of diffusion (Rogers 2003), with innumerable ways of spreading. The other is to see it in analogy to the scaling up of kind of innovative ‘prototypes’ by market actors (Kayser and Budinich 2015). The following refers to the more inter-relational and interactive concept of mainstreaming, as it was sketched earlier. And given the link with the focus on innovations in public social services, every sub-point emphasises the role of politics and governance. Below the Radar: Innovatory Changes at the Fringes of Civil Society and Systems Johnson (2010, 213f.) has convincingly argued that in the last decades innovations are increasingly created in what he calls ‘non-market/networked’ settings. This questions the former seemingly exclusive role of traditional settings such as enterprises, their research and design compartments; and they are everless brought about by individuals but increasingly by groups and teams. They may then be taken up quickly by entrepreneurs and in the business sphere or get significance in state-public institutions. The story of Silicon Valley may be an example for the first direction. Other examples may be the taking up of social innovations that stem from local groups, communities and stakeholders by public service systems. A seminal social innovation here was, for example, the forming of self-help groups of the type of ‘alcoholics anonymous’. As Giddens (1994, 120f.) has argued, this was and is a social innovation, since here people give intimate support, while simultaneously staying ‘strangers’ to each other. Today, our societies know innumerable such self-help groups.

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For the co-production concept it is important to realise how many innovative blueprints and stimuli come bottom-up from civil society—not only in terms of changing ‘taste’ and priorities of citizens as consumers but also in terms of collective action, be it by alternative self-organised services, quests for participating in the planning, designing and management of services or by protest and campaigning. It is there that one finds the centre of gravity of the co-productive links with institutions that may take shape later on, getting institutionalised to various degrees. The public health movement with its roots and links to self-help groups and associations provides just one example. Other examples include ‘friends’ associations’, i.e. groups of citizens forming an organisation that supports a public service organisation they benefit from. In Germany they can be found in the sector of cultural services, and especially in connection with schools (see Freise 2017). Very often they not only organise additional money but also negotiate with teachers and authorities around new and additional activities and courses or the design of complementary services like cafeterias and sport facilities. A school’s profile can be changed by such co-productive relationships, that are mostly new. In Germany such support associations are the most rapidly growing in the country (Priemer et al. 2017, 26f.). Many specific innovative changes at the interface of professional and administrative systems and the respective arenas of clients, citizens and stakeholders may not succeed and may therefore vanish; however, the key question is, whether or not the respective ‘movement’ of which they are a part can survive. Often this diffusion into the daily life and organisation of public service professionals happens without any special strategic action and intervention by the authorities. The developments that take place often depend on the space that is given in the respective service unit. Much of all this stays below the radar of state administrations and policy makers. Public money, interventions and regulations may come in at a later point. But what matters most, especially in the first stages of such inter-sectoral encounters, is the degree of need felt and the openness towards stakeholder groups that represent not only support but also nudges and the readiness for some kind of co-management. The diffusion of new co-productive attempts appears as dependent on the degree to which the institutions, mind-sets and practices that have developed over years in the respective sector are permeable to influences from addressees and stakeholders. This varies a lot, not only between the historical kind of services, as represented by ‘school’, ‘job centre’, ‘hospital’ and ‘theatre’, but also within the respective service sectors represented by them.

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Municipalities and Cities—Co-productive Innovations at the Interface of Society and Public Systems We have argued that social innovations, are characterised by three elements: concerns with an idea of the public good, a significant role of civil society and an intertwining of hopes and utopias with practical attempts to create service arrangements that work here and now. So it is no wonder that cities and municipalities have a key role for their development and governance, achieving ‘public innovation’ (Soerensen and Torfing 2015). Services and infrastructures meet people as citizens, clients, consumers or co-producers in concrete local settings; here people experience a more or less satisfying or stressful welfare mix, the intertwining of business, labour markets, public services, planning and policy making with peoples’, communities and everyday life. The local level represents various ‘micro-publics’ and even in very hierarchical and authoritarian political systems, that give little space for municipal decision-making, some room for doing different is to be found here. No wonder that it is the arena, where ideas for a better life can be tried out, notwithstanding the fact that there are considerable differences for local change and variation between closed and hierarchical and fairly open and decentralised service systems. While this may make all municipalities and their local government and administrations close to people and civil society, an important driver for social innovation to happen is the process of urbanisation with its condensation of rapid change, new ideas and actors. One might say, that the difference in the openness for and speed of (social) innovation is much more visible between small villages and big cities than between states and regions. While in the time of the internet some kind of open mindedness may be found everywhere, pressures for change and means for trying out something practical and new are concentrated in urban areas. Wherever there is a confluence of some degree of local political autonomy and the advancements and pressures of urbanisation policies, innovations with a social quality can find a fertile ground. This is shown by the socio-economic and cultural solutions tried out (see above) but also by a style of governance and decision-making that makes a difference. Barber (2013), among others, has described this kind of ‘mayor’s rule’ as a special mixture of pragmatism and readiness for trying out new things and ideas. Such mayors aim at collaborative styles and concepts of governance to be based on building a sense for the public good, both in the private and for-profit sectors of society and economy. It is however not only ‘place-based’ approaches driven by local governance and urban politics which play a pioneer role in generating and supporting social innovations with their cultural, socio-economic and democratic dimensions. The further development, upgrading and diffusion in society and politics can also be nourished by forms of horizontal exchange and collaboration in nationwide and inter-governmental networks such as, for example, the Network of Fearless Cities (Baird and Junque 2019), a global municipalist

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movement that seeks to defend human rights, democracy and the common good, or the network of Healthy Cities, promoting empowering concepts of public health, or the network of Solidarity Cities, an initiative on the management of the refugee crisis under the framework of the EUROCITIES network (Doomernik and Ardon 2018). Initiatives of cities can also be thought of in a vertical perspective as a component of a new multi-level governance that may reach from local levels right up to EU-institutions (see e.g. Grabbe and Valasek 2019, 35f.). While party politics that can be described in categories of left and right play a role in all this, there is another dimension prevailing that could be described by catchwords such as ‘collaborative’, ‘pragmatic’ or ‘value guided’. Such frameworks of orientation and practical action or experiments represent on a larger scale the similar ambitions to be found in the co-production debate. They can stabilise and upgrade social innovations, help to diffuse their messages and experiences and help them to enter the mainstream of services and professionalism. Thereby the tensions and dilemmas captured in the slogan ‘think global act local’ may be reduced. Changing Governance—From Pilot Programmes to a Democratic Experimentalism? Building and renewing public welfare in liberal democracies always had two components: on the one hand, the articulation of needs, the self-organisation of new kind of provision and services and, on the other hand, corresponding to that, the creation of social rights and well-institutionalised public services by central planning and law-making, safeguarding uniform standards in core areas of social security, education and health. A tradition has prevailed where the former elements, the claims for citizens and movements and ways of collective self-help by associations and cooperatives, were seen as kind of pressures and provisional arrangements, with the ultimate goal to install top-down new measures and services (Evers and Ewert 2016, 122f.). In the last few decades this kind of dualism, wherein the invention of non-governmental services was just a prelude to the real event—state law-making and service development— has been questioned from various sides, mostly from neoliberals calling for more market and to lesser degrees from the side of protagonists of a more participative concept of welfare and democracy. In this context the old tradition of governing by programs rather than by institutionalising firm rights and guaranteed services for citizens, giving governments more latitude, has been further developed by the increasing use of pilot programs. Governments, anticipating new tasks and ways to deal with them, reacting to public claims and criticisms, install more or less innovative measures with the promise to check them as blueprints for mainstreaming. All modern welfare democracies know the increasing use of such pilot programs in areas such as urban renewal, labour market integration or coping with immigration. In principal such programs open up an avenue for change in both

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direction: Central governments can try out new things and offers, while the respective local partners get some leeway to bring in innovative ideas and practices. One is accustomed to associate such channels for taking up and possibly mainstreaming social innovations with democracy and social progress; but the same instrument can also be used in reverse directions, as, for example, current pilot programs for developing and testing innovative forms of digital control and surveillance of citizens show. (On the mismatches and ambivalences in the relationship between social innovation and welfare reform, see also Oosterlynck et al. 2019.) In the last few years, various authors have developed a concept for building a link between central policy and welfare reform, on the one hand, and change by social innovation, on the other hand, that they call democratic experimentalism (see Unger 1998; Sabel and Simon 2017; Butler 2013; Moss 2012). Here: • ‘experimentalism’ means taking a pragmatic path to social change, trying out and collecting experiences and evidence before making far-reaching decisions • ‘democratic’ means several things simultaneously: giving leeway for trying out new solutions within civil society and at the lower levels of the democratic and administrative systems; acknowledging therein the role of people and stakeholders as co-designers and co-deliverers; putting forward a kind of professionalism and expertise that is sensitive to such inclusive practices; and finding approaches to evaluation that are based foremost on public debate and controversy and less on evaluation reports and technocracy, stimulating thereby a vital interplay between local social innovations, public debate and scrutiny and government policies. For the sector of public services, more especially early childhood education and care, Moss (2012) for example has suggested trying out such democratic experimentalism. Early childhood services should be developed by understanding them ‘as places of encounter between citizens, children and adults, and as collaborative workshops, capable of many purposes and projects…not as factories for producing predetermined outcomes and businesses’ (Moss 2012, 8). The central authorities in this kind of public child care service system should give impulses and frameworks that widen the range of choices—not as individual choices of consumers but by collective participation, dialogue and trust-building. Knowledge and expertise, its use and creation should be understood as something not exclusively held by professionals and policy makes, but as sitting also on the side of users, citizens and those that work daily in the child care institutions. Sketching democratic experimentalism as a way to make social innovation a firm component of a renewed form of governance is important because regrettably one finds many more examples, where pilot programmes that are

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open for use by local social innovators work differently. They are centrally designed and evaluated; there is little room for processes and public debates, wherein the authors and stakeholders of the local pilot project can explain their intentions and messages. No wonder then, that questions about how to get acceptance within an established discursive political and administrative framing prevail.

Summary and Conclusion Co-production is a wide and fuzzy concept. It touches issues that reach from individual service relations through to the cooperation of actors and organisations. Pointing to the fact that each kind of service and respective organisational system gives some kind of ‘co-productive role’ to its addressees, it touches a critical, central point: how to shape service-relations and servicesystems? Despite the many facets and differences in the present debate on co-production, there is a broad consent—shared by the authors of this paper— that it aims at a better, i.e. a more egalitarian/democratic/social approach to public services. Given the fact that many of the traditions, present routines and policy changes bar the way to co-production’s democratic and social ambition, confidence in a somehow better future in which the notion of co-production becomes mainstream in an almost evolutionary way appears as rather naïve. Given that, we suggest the need to learn from social innovation as a concept that helps to bring about a better service culture and the power to change welfare and service systems accordingly. It is about projects and practices that try at various points in society to develop new ‘promising’ solutions that work here and now, but also entail messages and concerns with wider changes. Framing the concern with more co-productive services as a matter of social innovation may help us to see what the co-production debate of today has in common with the search for new innovatory paths in other social and policy fields and with general problems of taking up innovatory blueprints in politics and governance that stem from social movements and innovatory projects that may have their center of gravity in civil society but cut across sectors and the often dividing lines between people, activists, experts and policy makers. This chapter has shown this with respect to two dimensions: It has first of all presented some key findings from social innovation research in the field of public services, showing, by which recurring innovative features ‘co-productive’ service designs make a difference to dominating features of service systems and practices. This has been illustrated with respect to five points: • personalised packages of services, crossing silos and sectors • bridging gaps by intermediating the worlds of experts and the life worlds of people in multicultural societies • acknowledging the impact of family and community ties • rebalancing protection and empowerment

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• conceiving a kind of social contract that stands for a fair balance between rights and responsibilities in co-productive service arrangements. Secondly, it has been argued from a perspective that frames co-production as a process that is about interactions between social innovations and politics; this helps in understanding better the opportunities, but also the risks and difficulties, of stabilising, upgrading and finally mainstreaming such concepts and practices. More attention is to be given then: • to innovatory changes at the fringes of civil society and systems, below the radar of policy makers and administrators • to urban settings, municipalities and cities—since they move from the fringes to the centre as arenas for co-productive innovations • to pilot programmes that link in some ways policy making at central levels and local action; such a change in programme governance might pave the way for a democratic experimentalism; instead of merely putting to the test what is planned and designed in traditional fashion, it would give leeway to more public debates, participative and collaborative ways of interaction. Altogether these points could be seen as part of an agenda for a more coproductive culture of services and ways of policy making that might make it more real. However, they could also be taken as points of reference for a critical analysis of the prevailing tendencies in public services—far away from, or even contrary to, the kind of a socially innovative co-production that has been sketched here.

Literature Alford, J. (2009). Engaging Public Sector Clients: From Service Delivery to CoProduction. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Anheier, H.K., Krlev, G., & Mildenberger, G. (2018). Social innovation: What is it and who makes it? In H. K. Anheier, G. Krlev, & G. Mildenberger (eds.). Social Innovation: Comparative Perspectives (pp. 3–35). New York/London: Routledge. Baird, K.S., & Junque, M. (eds.). (2019). Fearless Cities: A Guide to the Global Municipalist Movement. Barcelona: New Internationalist. Barber, B. (2013). If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bartels, K. (2017). The double bind of social innovation: Relational dynamics of change and resistance in neighbourhood governance. Urban Studies, 54(16), 3789–3805. Boadu, P., Gluns, D., Rentzsch, C., Walter, A., & Zimmer, A. (2014). Münster. In A. Evers, B. Ewert, & T. Brandsen (eds.). Social Innovations for Social Cohesion: Transnational Patterns and Approaches from 20 European Cities (pp. 131–156). Brussels: WILCO Project.

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Bode, I. (2019). Let’s count and manage—And forget the rest: Understanding numeric rationalization in human service provision. Historical Social Research, 44(2), 131–154. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2012). We’re all in this together: User and community co-production of public outcomes. A Discussion Paper. Online available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271213188_We%27re_all_in_ this_together_User_and_community_co-production_of_public_outcomes. Accessed 21 May 2019. Brandsen, T., Cattacin, S., Evers, A., & Zimmer, A. (eds.). (2016). Social Innovations in the Urban Context. New York/Heidelberg: Springer. Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2016). Distinguishing different types of coproduction: A conceptual analysis based on the classical definitions. Public Administration Review, 76(3), 427–435. Busemeyer, M., de La Porte, C., & Garritzmann, J.L. (2018). The Future of the Social Investment State: Politics, Policies and Outcomes. New York/London: Routledge. Butler, E. (ed.). (2013). Democratic Experimentalism. Amsterdam/New York: Editions Rodopi. Cunningham, I. (2016). Non-profits and the ‘hollowed out’ state: The transformation of working conditions through personalizing social care services during an era of austerity. Work, Employment & Society, 30(4), 649–668. Doomernik, J., & Ardon, D. (2018). The city as an agent of refugee integration. Urban Planning, 3(4), 91–100. Durose, C., & Richardson, L. (2015). Designing Public Policy for Co-Production: Theory Practice and Change. Bristol: Policy Press. Evers, A., & Brandsen, T. (2016). Social innovations as messages: Democratic experimentation in local welfare systems. In T. Brandsen, C. Cattacin, A. Evers, & A. Zimmer (eds.). (2016). Social Innovations in the Urban Context (pp. 161–180). New York/Heidelberg: Springer. Evers, A., & Ewert, B. (2016). Social innovation for social cohesion. In A. Nicholls, J. Simon, & M. Gabriel (eds.). New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research (pp. 107– 127). Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Evers, A., Ewert, B., & Brandsen, T. (2014). Social Innovations for Social Cohesion: Transnational Patterns and Approaches from 20 European Cities. WILCO project: Brussels. Online available at: http://www.wilcoproject.eu/book/chapters/aboutthis-book/. Accessed 16 May 2019. Ewert, B. (2016). Poor but sexy? Berlin as a context for social innovation. In T. Brandsen, C. Cattacin, A. Evers, & A. Zimmer (eds.). (2016). Social Innovations in the Urban Context (pp. 143–160). Berlin und Heidelberg: Springer. Ewert, B., & Evers, A. (2012). Co-production: Contested meanings and challenges for user organizations. In V. Pestoff, T. Brandsen, & B. Verschuere (eds.). New Public Governance, the Third Sector and Co-Production (pp. 61–78). New York: Routledge. Freise, M. (2017). Substituting for the state? Friendship societies in Germany. Voluntas, 28(1), 184–203. Garthwaite, K. (2016). Hunger Pains: Life Inside Foodbank Britain. Bristol: Policy Press. Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond Left and Right. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Glimmerveen, L., Yberma, S., & Nies, H. (2018). Empowering citizens or mining resources? The contested domain of citizen engagement in professional care services. Social Science & Medicine, 203(2018), 1–8.

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Grabbe, H., & Valasek, T. (2019). Refocus the European Union: Planet, Lifetime, Technology. Carnegie Europe. https://carnegieendowment.org/files/refocusthe-european-union.pdf. Accessed 17 May 2019. Hannah, M. (2014). Humanising Healthcare: Patterns of Hope for a System Under Strain. Devon: Triarchy Press. Hasselaar, J., & Payne, S. (2016). Integrated Palliative Care, Nijmegen: Radboud University Medical Center. Online available at: http://www.insup-c.eu/Integrate dPalliativeCare2016.pdf. Accessed 16 May 2019. Johnson, St. (2010). Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. New York: Riverhead Books. Kayser, O., & Budinich, V. (2015). Scaling Up Business Solutions to Social Problems. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Langer, A., Eurich, J., & Güntner, S. (2019). Innovation in Social Services. New York/Heidelberg: Springer. Lindsay, C., Pearson, S., Batty, E., Cullen, A., & Eadson, W. (2019). Street-level practice, personalisation and co-production in employability: Insights from local services with lone parents. Social Policy and Society, 18(4), 647–658. Moss, P. (2012). There are alternatives! Markets and democratic experimentalism in early childhood education and care. Working Paper No. 53. Bernard van Leer Foundation and Bertelsmann Stiftung. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED522533.pdf. Accessed 17 May 2019. Moulaert, F. (2010). Social innovation and community development: Concepts, theories and challenges. In F. Moulaert, F. Martinelli, E. Swygedouw, & S. González (eds.). Can Neighbourhoods Save the City? (pp. 4–16). London/New York: Routledge. Mulgan, G. (2019). Social Innovation: How Societies Find the Power to Change. Bristol/Chicago: Policy Press. Murray, R., Caulier-Grice, J., & Mulgan, G. (2010). The Open Book of Social Innovation. London: The Young Foundation. Online available at: https://youngf oundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/The-Open-Book-of-Social-Innova tiong.pdf. Accessed 17 May 2019. Nabatchi, T., Sancino, A., & Sicilia, M. (2017). Varieties of participation in public services: The who, when, and what of coproduction. Public Administration Review, 77(5), 766–776. Oosterlynck, S., Novy, A., & Kazepov, Y. (2019). Conclusion: Local social innovation and welfare reform. In St. Oosterlynck, A. Novy, & Y. Kazepov (eds.). Local Social Innovation to Combat Poverty and Exclusion: A Critical Appraisal (pp. 217–228). Bristol/Chicago: Policy Press. Osborne, S.P., Radnor, Z., & Strokosch. K. (2016). Co-production and the co-creation of value in public services: A suitable case for treatment? Public Management Review, 18(5), 639–653. Pape, U., Chaves-Ávila, R., Pahl, J. B., Petrella, F., Pielinski, ´ B., & Savall-Morera, T. (2016). Working under pressure: Economic recession and third sector development in Europe. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 36(7/8), 547–566. Phills, J. (2008). Rediscovering social innovation. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 6(4), 36–43. Priemer, J., Krimmer, H., & Labigne, A. (2017). Ziviz Survey 2017. https://www. ziviz.info/ziviz-survey-2017. Accessed 17 May 2019. Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press.

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Sabel, C., & Simon, W. (2017). Democratic experimentalism. In J. Desautels-Stein & C. Tomlins (eds.). Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (pp. 477–498). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soerensen, E., & Torfing, J. (2015). Enhancing public innovation through collaboration, leadership and new public governance. In A. Nicholls, J. Simon, & M. Gabriel (eds.). New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research (pp. 145–169). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Unger, R. M. (1998). Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative. London/New York: Verso. Van Beek, K., Van Ende, S., Dautzenberg, M., & Menten, J. (2016). Enabling patients to stay at home until death: White Yellow Cross in Belgium. In J. Hasselaar & S. Payne. (2016). Integrated Palliative Care (pp. 15–19). Nijmegen: Radboud University Medical Center.

CHAPTER 8

The Importance of Co-production in Branding as Governance Strategy Erik-Hans Klijn and Vidar Stevens

Introduction: The Marriage of Branding and Co-production as a New Governance Strategy? The concept of co-production has been around for as long as governments have existed. Nevertheless only with the works of Ostrom et al. (1978), and other scholars, like Brudney and England (1983), Levine (1984), and Whitaker (1980), did the concept of co-production become officially recognised in the public administration literature. After virtually disappearing from academic discourse for almost two decades (Uzochukwu and Thomas 2018, 514), the phenomenon has drawn new attention recently (see the review article of Voorberg et al. 2014), inter alia in the field of branding (Zavattaro 2018, 103–105). Co-production in branding refers to a phenomenon whereby citizens partner with government to jointly develop, implement and execute brands and marketing campaigns that trigger positive associations about a policy, a place, a person, an organisation or a governmental service (Eshuis and Klijn 2012).

E.-H. Klijn (B) Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] V. Stevens Mulier Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_8

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Remarkably, the increasing use of the participatory activities of branding and marketing in the public sector has been largely overlooked in the literature about collaboration, network governance and co-production. In fact, these streams of literature hardly mention branding at all. This is surprising for at least two reasons. First of all, we are witnessing a growing importance of branding in the public sector, so it is strange that this trend seems to be largely ignored by public administration scholars. Secondly, branding is significantly distinguished from most other ‘normal’ governance strategies and this certainly justifies more attention to this phenomenon in the public administration literature (Eshuis and Klijn 2012). The Surge of Branding as Governance Strategy To elucidate, branding has become a common empirical phenomenon in the public sphere in general, and in governance processes more specifically (Eshuis and Klijn 2012). Politicians and political parties brand themselves to attract voters (Obama’s ‘new hope’, Blair’s ‘New Labour’), cities brand themselves with place brands to attract visitors and firms (‘I ♥ New York’), public organisations brand themselves to attract employees or defend their reputation, and policies are branded, for example as ‘innovative’ or ‘interactive’, to enhance policy support and strengthen the image of the government that developed the policy (see Fay and Zavattaro 2016; Zavattaro 2010; Marland et al. 2017; Lees-Marshment 2009). Branding, as such, has become a governance strategy that is widely applied in the public sector. Hence, it is important to understand branding. In addition, for theoretical purposes branding is interesting to examine because it works differently than classic governance strategies. Brands work largely through the visual, triggering emotions and trying to entice people instead of using words, argumentation and regulation through rules or more or less rational incentives (see Eshuis and Klijn 2012). In this way, the study of branding in governance processes opens up the symbolic, visual and emotional side of governance processes. A distinctive feature of our contemporary society is that we live in a mediatised world (see Hjarvard 2008; Klijn and Korthagen 2018) where visual images, emotions and communicating through media with appealing messages have become a major factor in gaining attention and getting things done (Bennett 2009). Branding, as such, offers governments a new instrument to deal with these mediatised dynamics. Co-production in Branding Research on co-production and branding in the public sphere has not advanced very fast up till now. Although within the field of place branding there are debates among marketing scholars about the value of participatory marketing processes, our understanding of branding as a governance strategy, and especially how to involve citizens in these processes, is still lagging behind, compared to the vast amount of work on network governance

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and co-production in general (Stevens 2019). Braun et al. (2013, 19) even state that the ‘theory and practice of branding show considerable shortcomings in considering the role citizens can play as co-producers in branding processes’. In this chapter, therefore, we explore branding as governance strategy. Specific attention is devoted to the role of citizens as co-producers therein. The chapter is structured as follows: • We first explore branding as governance strategy and how it differs from ordinary governance strategies (sect. ‘Branding as Governance Strategy: Different from Normal Governance Strategies’). • We then discuss the added value of co-production in branding processes. In addition, we consider various ways in which co-production of branding can be organised. Here, we propose a typology of co-production processes in branding. • We then look at available research on involving citizens and organising activities of brand co-production and what this suggests about the effects and problems with co-production in branding. • The following section suggests new theoretical pathways to explore in future research. Specifically, we propose to devote more attention in prospective studies to the generative mechanisms in activities of brand co-production. In addition, we propose specific management strategies that can be enacted to stimulate activities of co-production and branding with citizens. • Finally, the chapter provides conclusions and reflections on the possibilities and pitfalls of co-production with citizens in branding.

Branding as Governance Strategy: Different from Normal Governance Strategies Branding is a governance strategy to identify (public) objects, policies, places or persons and distinguish them from others by connecting them to certain symbols and imbuing them with positive meaning. To explore branding as a governance strategy we first pay attention to what a brand is, how it works, and its specific governance character. Public Brands: Creating Meaning for Public Goods, Policies, Actors, Places or Processes In his seminal work on branding and brand equity, Aaker (1991, 7) defines a brand as: ‘a distinguishing name and/or symbol intended to identify the goods or services of either one seller or a group of sellers, and to differentiate those goods or services from those of competitors’. A brand thus is not the product itself (although of course it is related to it). It gives meaning and value to the product and defines its identity (Kapferer 1992). In other words, a brand

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signals to consumers where a product or service comes from and makes it identifiable. For a public brand a slightly different definition is required, which puts less emphasis on sellers and competitors. Hence, we define, in line with Eshuis and Klijn (2012, 19) a brand as: ‘a symbolic construct that consists of a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of these, created deliberately to identify a phenomenon and differentiate it from similar phenomena by adding particular meaning to it’. The latter definition indicates that brands are manifested in certain brand elements such as names, signs or symbols. To give an example a city brand is a sign with a denotative function that identifies an object (I ♥ New York as a slogan to identify New York). It also has a connotative function, as it evokes the associations through which the city is imbued with cultural meaning (cf. Danesi 2006). For example, the Berlin brand often evokes such associations as ‘edgy’ and ‘artistic’. These associations make the city valuable to visitors both psychologically and socially by offering connection with a certain style and community of people. Public brands can be created for people, places, organisations or policies. How Branding Works: Creating Meaning as a Neurological and Psychological Process Branding thus involves the evocation of positive associations about something. In particular, branding is about connecting a specific phenomenon, for example, a policy, with certain ideas by forging deliberate associations. To clarify this, we turn to the genesis of associations in the brain. Every encounter with a brand produces particular associations. Over time, during multiple encounters, a web of associations develops in the brain. This involves the reinforcement of particular connections between neurons. Neurons that store certain sounds, visual impressions, or words become more strongly connected to the brand. In a neuropsychological sense a brand is a ‘totality of stored synaptic connections’ (Batey 2008, 5). Branding is about consciously connecting a phenomenon with particular words, images, emotions and ideas, in order to facilitate the development of particular webs of associations in people’s brains. To that end, logos, wordmarks, slogans and visual images, but also music, can be used. For example, Bill Clinton used a pop song, ‘Don’t Stop’ by the pop group Fleetwood Mac, in his 1992 campaign to appeal to a generation of people who knew the song from their childhood (the 1970s), thereby creating an image of him as a ‘young and dynamic leader’. As brands aim to create meaning and associations and these associations are, subsequently, interpreted and potentially communicated further by citizens through word-of-mouth, brands by their very nature involve at least some form of coproduction (Kavaratzis and Asworth 2005). This dual role of citizens, as being both a brand receiver and potentially a sender of a brand, makes it clear why co-production with citizens is crucial for the effectiveness of branding.

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Branding: A Different Governance Strategy The activity of branding can be organised very top-down, often hierarchically by a single entity, or very interactively, where citizens are co-producing a brand. The first branding approach is in the literature interpreted as a ‘sales’ approach (see Eshuis and Klijn 2012): the brand is developed more or less solely by the brand initiator, who independently decides about the message, the logo, the visual, and all the other aspects of the brand, and then rolls the brand out by communicating it to a particular target group. In this case the actual co-production of citizens is very limited as they follow the meaning and associations created by the brand initiator. However, even within such a top-down branding situation citizens can, over time, change the meaning and associations of the brand, as is often emphasised in the literature (see Arvidsson 2006; Batey 2008). Although a lot of branding campaigns are still organised in this top-down way, the understanding has emerged that branding is most effective through the involvement of citizens (or other stakeholders such as businesses, civil society organisations, or other non-public actors), which can be understood as the second ‘co-branding’ approach. In fact, brand initiators and marketers often invest in more interactive forms of branding that allow citizens to participate in the brand formation and communication process (Braun et al. 2013). Hence, current branding practices have become more and more a multi-actor governance process in which both the brand (and its image), and the brand effect, are co-produced by a large network of actors (see Hankinson 2004; Merrilees et al. 2009; Klijn et al. 2012). In that sense, branding, but above all brand co-production, as a governance strategy, shows many similarities with other governance strategies. Nevertheless, branding as a governance strategy can also be sharply distinguished from other governance strategies. Branding builds on the idea that emotional liking is crucial in deliberating and making choices. In that sense, ideas on branding differ significantly from most theories about policymaking and governance, in which the rational or at least the reasonable aspect of deliberating and discussing policy content is dominant. Brands build on the insight that, in the deliberation that forms part of policy processes, emotions ‘help to assign values to different options or product attributes’ (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2003, 28). Values or key concerns structure the relative importance of things, and emotional responses inform us about what we value (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2003). Without emotions, it becomes very difficult to determine what is important and to make up one’s mind (Marcus 2000; Turner 2007). Most theories about policymaking, even those that focus on framing and discourses (see Fischer 2003), tend to emphasise the fact that deliberation is about constructing logical arguments for choices and confronting these with each other (see Dryzek 2000; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003). Here, emotions (and power) are seen as distorting the ‘good process of deliberation’, as emotions are not logical. Thus, one can say that the role

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of emotions in policy processes is systematically downplayed in most public administration perspectives and governance theories. Hence, the branding literature, with its focus on the aspect of emotional linking, also has something to offer for governance theories.

Co-production in Branding: Brand Communities and Forms of Engagement The Establishment of Brand Communities Ideally, co-production for branding purposes with citizens stimulates the emergence of so-called ‘brand communities’. Brand communities are understood by Muniz and O’Guinn (2001, 412) as ‘specialized, non-geographically bound communities, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand’. Brand communities represent a form of human association situated within a particular public sector context, whether it be a public service, policy, politician or neighbourhood. There are several reasons that underlie the brand initiators’ interest in establishing brand communities (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001; Hankinson 2004). First of all, on the most basic level, a brand community allows the quick dissemination of information about how different citizens perceive a brand message. Secondly, by adding more citizens to a brand community more support, and perhaps also more resource, becomes available to implement a marketing campaign. Thirdly, a brand community increases the reach of a branding campaign, as different citizens have their own peer networks and target audiences with whom they engage and interact on a regular basis. Fourthly, citizens that are added to the stakeholder-mix in a brand community, often have their own marketing activities and reputation, which, when the reputation is positive, can add extra value to the brand initiator’s efforts. Fifthly, if a group of citizens supports a branding activity by contributing to the community, the branding effort can be perceived by ‘outsiders’ as a more legitimate and open branding effort. We do realise, however, that establishing a brand community is difficult; not all citizens will be interested in actively contributing to a brand. Therefore, we argue that establishing a brand community is the most advantageous form of brand coproduction. However, there are other ways for citizens to leave their mark, through co-production, on a branding process. Forms of Co-production in Branding We interpret, as indicated in the introduction, co-production in branding as the phenomenon whereby citizens partner with government to jointly develop, implement and execute brands and marketing campaigns that trigger positive associations about a policy, a place, a person, an organisation, or a governmental service (Eshuis and Klijn 2012). Below, we discuss three forms of

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co-production in branding, which differ in the amount of citizen involvement present in the co-production activities: citizens as brand communicators (creating word-of-mouth), citizens as brand adaptors, and citizens as brand initiators. Table 8.1 provides an overview in which we compare the three forms of brand co-production. The lightest form of co-production is citizens merely communicating the brand further. In the marketing literature this activity is called word-of-mouth: people taking up the brand and communicating it further (Hanna and Rowley 2011). Word-of-mouth is a very important, almost crucial, element for a brand to have an effect and achieve its aims (binding people, creating meaning. and achieving behavioural change in people). Word-of-mouth is said to triple the communication effect of a branding campaign (Hankinson 2004; Hanna and Rowley 2011). The main reason for this is that such communication is not driven by commercial interests. Citizens voluntarily decide if they want to communicate the brand further. So, citizens communicating positively about a Table 8.1 Forms of citizen involvement in processes of brand co-production

Extent of citizen involvement

Communication process

Development of brand

Strength of the brand image

Citizens as brand communicators

Citizens as brand adaptors

Low: citizens are involved in spreading the brand through word-of-mouth communication One-way communication (citizens as consumer, they only use the brand in communication) Development stays with initiator, citizens do not influence development process

Medium: citizens are involved through maintaining and adapting the brand

Strength of the brand message originates from the strength of its associations (the brand appeals to citizens)

Citizens as brand initiators

High: intense citizens’ involvement in developing and constructing the brand Two-way Citizens contribute communication; actively in maintaining the brand message (for government and citizens jointly instance, by uploading (further) develop the stories) brand Development stays with Citizens are (partly) the initiator and brand initiator, but creator of the brand, citizens contribute to the maintenance of the and responsible for maintaining the brand message (and brand’s value and adapt it) power Strength of the Strength of the brand depends on how much brand is derived from citizens get inspired by the way in which the brand and its the brand, add to it, associations are and follow it (active contribution of citizens) nurtured and supported by a community of citizens

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branding process by local government are seen as much more credible than if local government does it itself. People mostly engage in word-of-mouth from motives such as feeling an obligation to share information, gaining pleasure in doing so, or from a desire to help others (see Baker 2007, 152). Word-ofmouth thus requires a deliberate action by citizens to be a part of the brand community. It also shows that the brand communication process and its effect are highly dependent on citizens’ engagement. Overall, the active involvement of citizens within the brand community is not very intensive as they are not a part of the brand development and execution processes. The second, more intensive, form of co-production of citizens in a branding process is when citizens are involved in maintaining and upholding the brand. Brand development is still solely done by the brand initiator. This means that the brand initiator decides what images and associations are communicated, but there is ‘delegated’ freedom for citizens to determine their own marketing contributions to the campaign, as long as these branding activities fall within the boundaries set by the initiator. As such, a broad brand message is defined, in order to provide consistency in the narrative of the branding campaign. Within the parameters of the broad brand message, citizens can highlight their own brand experience and determine their own target audience to distinguish their narrative from the other or overall branding activities. Citizens thus co-produce the communication (as they do in the first form) but also the maintenance of the brand, and adapt the brand during this process. Often this implies that the brand initiator establishes general protocols and guidelines for marketing the brand message, but individual citizens in the brand community can decide by themselves what the best promotional mix of advertising and marketing is to reach their own selected target audiences. The third and final form of co-production refers to citizens who are involved in both developing, maintaining and communicating the brand (see also Braun et al. 2013). Within the branding process, involved citizens together decide about the brand message that is articulated, what marketing activities are executed to support the campaign, and in what promotional mix a brand message is sent out to which target audiences. The brand message and the set-up of the branding campaign is, as such, a compromise in an interaction process, where citizens voice their own brand stories, opinions, or expectations with regard to the branding campaign. To avoid any contradictions, confusion and inconsistencies among individual branding stories, involved actors will try to reach an outcome that satisfies all needs. In this way, the value and the power of the brand depends on the devotion of engaged actors to maintain, and when necessary, strengthen the collaboration for the branding effort. Thus, in this last form of co-production, citizens not only create the brand together with a possible brand initiator but also ‘co-produce’ the communication strategy and further development of the brand.

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Empirical Research on Public Co-production and Branding Despite the growing interest, and high flying expectations, of practitioners in the phenomenon of co-production in branding, the scholarly literature offers little theory or evidence on who engages in brand co-production, why they engage in it, how co-production processes for branding purposes occur, and what effects processes of co-production in branding have (Pryor and Grossbart 2007). Until now, scholars have mainly used a case study approach to unravel the processes of brand co-production. Although some of the empirical studies try to address participation and co-production of citizens, a significant number of the empirical studies take a broader perspective and focus on brand participation and co-production of stakeholders in general. Whereas in practices of co-production, citizens have a ‘veto power’ and bigger say in the development of a branding campaign, in ‘brand participation’ there is a less dominant role for citizens, who are merely invited to spread the brand message or check whether the defined brand message finds resonance among a group of citizens. Nevertheless, the few empirical studies to date have provided us with some insights into the participatory dynamics of processes of branding and coproduction (Aitken and Campelo 2011; Therkelsen et al. 2010). Pasquinelli (2011, 231), for example, undertook a case study of the Val di Cornia region in Italy to see how a group of stakeholders, including businesses, citizens and local governments, was capable of rebranding the area, by changing the image of a rural area hosting a declining old industry. Citizens as Co-producers Distinguished from Other Stakeholders Several other studies emphasise the differences between various groups that are involved in co-production and also show that the role and impact of citizens seems to differ from other groups. Zenker and Beckman (2013), for instance, delve into the various branding target groups to flesh out the differences between them. They distinguish four large groups: visitors, residents and workers, business and industry, and export markets. What follows from their study is that internal stakeholders, those familiar with the branded area, had vastly different associations than external stakeholders, whose perceptions were based mostly on marketing stereotypes. In a related study, Eshuis et al. (2018) show, based on a survey among brand managers in the Netherlands and Germany, that including stakeholders in branding has different effects on policies. Involving residents and public managers especially increases the influence of place marketing on spatial planning policies, and involving business has more influence on tourism/leisure policies. These two studies teach us that governments in their efforts to brand a neighbourhood or city area through co-production can interact with a wide variety of actors. Hence, by including

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these actors, brand managers may be confronted with quite different opinions about the brand (see also Kavaratzis and Asworth 2005; Merrilees et al. 2009). If these different opinions are not nurtured and managed properly, coproduction with citizens may lead to different (negative) results than expected; see, for instance, the work of Van Buuren and Warner (2014), who introduce the term ‘backfiring’ or ‘boomerang’ branding to highlight that a branding campaign can backfire if citizens reject the brand message. Democratic Legitimacy Must Be Worked on Does including citizens enhance the democratic legitimacy and the acceptance and effectiveness of the brand as governance instrument? In another study, Eshuis and Edwards (2013), using the lens of democratic legitimacy to study the role and participation of citizens in brand co-production activities in the Netherlands, show that democratic legitimacy via citizen participation was not achieved. Much of the participation in their cases was token and meant solely to provide the appearance of participation, in order to promote what the city government and local elites had already decided about the brand. This led to much uproar among the citizens who participated in the brand coproduction processes. Hence, Eshuis and Edwards (2013) argue that aspects of democracy, legitimacy and genuine participation are important if branding, and processes of co-production, are to be taken seriously as new governance strategies. In a similar vein, Eshuis and Klijn (2012) take us down the path of how to organise processes of co-production for branding purposes and how to ensure inclusivity among the stakeholders who engage in the branding effort. Among other things, they argue, from a public management and governance stance, that co-production involves shifting the way public managers view their roles, transforming them from being simply top-down bureaucrats to becoming more like facilitators looking for meaningful ways to include relevant stakeholders in decision-making spaces. In their view, co-production and governance in branding becomes a new way of thinking and operating and not just a passing fad or casual side issue. Obstacles and Effects Involving stakeholders, particularly citizens, encounters a wide variety of obstacles. Eshuis et al. (2013), building on survey results from brand managers, identify various obstacles that also play an important role in co-production. The first challenge relates to organisational barriers, such as inexperience with organising participatory branding processes, as well as buy-in about its importance. The second challenge relates to reaching target audiences, the fit between the area or issue to be branded and the campaign, and finding a brand which resonates with local stakeholders. The final challenge relates to political barriers of organising, developing and implementing

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branding and marketing strategies in the public sector. In particular, there are questions about whether a marketing campaign might interfere with the image or actions of politicians, and whether triggering positive associations in people’s minds through marketing activities is a legitimate way to influence public opinion about a place, a policy or a service. Most scholars, however, point out that more studies are needed to really understand how the process of brand co-production takes place at ground level (Zavattaro 2018; Eshuis and Klijn 2012; Lucarelli and Brorström 2013). Pryor and Grossbart (2007), for instance, have already begun to fill this gap by developing a model of meaning-making in multi-actor branding processes. At the same time, however, they also acknowledge that more knowledge is necessary to open the black-box of branding and marketing decision-making spaces. In our view, this could be achieved by connecting the branding literature to the literature on network governance, stakeholder involvement and participation which offers some general insights in how to organise and manage processes of co-production. In particular, we argue in the next section that more attention should be devoted in prospective studies to the generative mechanisms of coproduction in branding campaigns, and the management of these generative processes (Stevens 2019).

The Generative Mechanisms of Co-production and Branding Generative mechanisms can best be understood as the ‘processes’ by which a causal relation comes about; in our case, the mechanisms through which co-production actually leads to legitimate branding outcomes. Within the collaborative governance and network governance literature scholarly effort has already been devoted to disentangling generative mechanisms of collaborative processes of decision-making. Ansell and Torfing (2014, 10) distinguish synergy, commitment and learning as generative mechanisms in collaborative work practices. Synergy is the process in which stakeholders bring together complementary resources or capabilities (i.e. resource-sharing). Commitment is understood as the process through which groups build trust, and thereby ultimately consensus and support for a particular outcome (Ansell and Torfing 2014, 11). Lastly, learning is considered as the process whereby cognitive change occurs as a result of interaction between different stakeholders, which can transform or reframe the collective sense of possibility or generate new ideas (Ansell and Torfing 2014, 11). According to Ansell and Torfing (2014), if the three generative mechanisms are ‘in place’, then collaborations between stakeholders will be more fruitful. In similar fashion, Emerson et al. (2012) propose a different taxonomy of generative mechanisms. They argue in their Collaborative Governance Regime Model that, through principled engagement, capacity for joint action, and shared motivation, collaboration actually leads to joint actions. Principled engagement encompasses the interaction of discovery, definition, deliberation

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and determination. During principled engagement, participants in a collaborative governance regime develop a shared theory of change, which is, in essence, a strategy for accomplishing the collective purpose and target goals of the collaboration. Second, shared motivation consists of trust, mutual understanding, internal legitimacy, and shared commitment. Finally, capacity for joint action consists of procedural and institutional arrangements, leadership, knowledge and resources (Emerson et al. 2012, 722). The literature on network governance offers more or less similar concepts and mechanisms for enhancing co-production and its effect. Klijn and Koppenjan (2016) emphasise the importance of differences in perceptions between actors (and managerial attempts to bridge gaps between them or construct package deals that are interesting for the involved actors) and aligning various strategies of actors. They also emphasise learning processes between actors in a collaborative process and highlight the importance of trust (and building trust between actors). The importance of (network) management and trust has also been illustrated several times in empirical research (Provan et al. 2009; Klijn et al. 2010; Willem and Lucidarme 2014; Markovic 2017). Despite the fact that the taxonomies in these approaches use different terms, we see considerable overlap. Specifically, all theoretical orientations refer to a process component (i.e. interaction for discovery and learning), a relational component (i.e. building of trust), and a functional component (i.e. resource sharing) of collaboration in their writings. And all perspectives emphasise the active managerial effort involved in achieving co-production. Co-production does not come about by itself but has to be facilitated, fostered and organised (see Stevens and Agger 2017). We believe that the aforementioned theoretical and empirical endeavours of collaborative governance scholars provide a route to follow for the co-production and branding literature. As in other aspects of collaborative governance, stakeholders in the practices of brand co-production can hold different perceptions and views (see Merrilees et al. 2009; Eshuis et al. 2018), may be reluctant to collaborate and learn from one another, or may paralyse the brand co-creation process for strategic or monetary reasons. An initial study on the generative mechanisms in co-production processes of branding has now been conducted by Stevens (2019). By using the inferential network statistics methodology of Exponential Random Graph Modelling to study the micro-level learning interactions in a Flemish case of (place) brand co-production, Stevens shows that learning between stakeholders depends on the factor of belief homophily (i.e. the stakeholders have the same idea of what message the brand has to convey), the relational history between network peers, the ingenuity of individuals, and a person’s perception of the societal relevance of the branding process. If we look at the generative mechanisms that we see in the literature on governance and co-production, and link them to the managerial strategies that have been confirmed by empirical network management research, we can

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already identify a few important ‘to do’ strategies for setting up co-production processes with citizens in branding: 1. Building trust relations between stakeholders, and especially citizens and the brand initiator, is of the utmost importance. This can be done by increasing and facilitating interactions between the brand initiator and citizens. However, the choice of the brand and how it relates to citizens’ ideas is of course also relevant. This requires knowledge about citizens and their perceptions of policy problems and policy issues and an active attitude on the part of the brand initiator. 2. Attempts have to be made to achieve learning processes in which new ideas are generated. In the case of co-production with citizens, branding provides probably more possibilities for this than ‘ordinary’ governance processes. If we take place branding, for instance, citizens can be activated by articulating their ideas about the image of the place that is to be branded (like a neighbourhood). But citizens can also be motivated to contribute to the development of the brand by uploading stories of a place (see Eshuis et al. 2014). In this way, co-production with citizens becomes a continuous learning process where both the brand meaning as well as the community of citizens that are involved. 3. Co-production in branding does not emerge by itself. We know from empirical research in the fields of collaborative and network governance, that it needs active nurturing and management to happen. A clear set of process rules and a significant managerial effort to guide the interactive process is necessary. This not only involves setting up the ground rules for interaction, so that it is clear when and how co-production with citizens is organised, but also communicating the limits to coproduction. And, of course active invitations for citizens to participate in the co-production process are crucial.

Conclusions In conclusion, more and more governments use brand co-production as a new governance strategy to engage with citizens. Governments use brand coproduction, for example, to connect more citizens to the development of society (especially, the revitalisation of cities and neighbourhoods) but also to enhance the effectiveness of public branding campaigns. The main goal of brand co-production with citizens is to create and maintain so-called brand communities; i.e. groups of citizens that not only embrace the brand but also communicate the brand and preferably co-create and adapt the brand. Within such a brand community a brand can become a ‘living’ image that evolves as citizens contribute to the brand image with new ideas, stories, and experiences. Branding, as such, connects with citizens on a wholly different neurological level than most other governance strategies, due to its visual and

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emotional character. One can even argue that branding makes it easier for citizens to contribute to governance processes, as the classical participation and co-producing instruments rely heavily on formal interaction moments and written documents, while branding simply demands that citizens share their stories and experiences related to the brand image. In addition, branding as a strategy also fits well with the demands of our modern and mediatised world, where visual images and quick messages have become more important in communication (see Bennett 2009). Unfortunately, the full potential of co-production is only rarely visible in practices of branding (for an exception see Eshuis et al. 2013). In practice, most brands are still developed and communicated in a rather top-down manner by a brand initiator. Co-production with citizens is then mostly limited to stimulating word-of-mouth by citizens of the brand (the lightest form of co-production). Brand initiators seldom invite citizens to act as brand adaptors or brand initiators. For that, much more interaction between brand initiator and citizens is needed, together with much more managerial effort to make the brand coproduction process work. Nevertheless, we hope that we have shown in this chapter the potential which branding has as a new governance strategy and what new pathways can be explored to get a better sense of how to foster practices of brand co-production.

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CHAPTER 9

Getting to Authentic Co-production: An Asset-Based Community Development Perspective on Co-production Cormac Russell

Introduction One of the more reliable measures of authentic co-production is the extent to which professionals and their organisations conform to the principle of subsidiarity, expressed in two interrelated ways: First, professionals and organisations that employ co-production intentionally seek to do no harm to social capital, by which I mean the collective efficacy evident in community action and/or the agency and relational networks of the individual citizens they serve. Second, they take on, in agreement with those they serve, subsidiary functions that do not replace the functions of citizens, their families, friendship groups and their wider communities but enhance them when required. There is yet another entry point into this conversation, through the lens of community development. From this perspective, our frame of reference is broadened beyond co-production, beginning with the wider question of how citizens and organisations might work separately as well as together to build a better social order. From this wider socio-political view, I propose to taper the conversation back to the narrower question of how co-production can play a useful role towards such ends. This approach is inspired by a quote from Gustavo Gutierrez (2004): C. Russell (B) The Asset-Based Community-Development Institute at DePaul Universiy, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.

Building a different social order logically necessitates a fresh approach to the currently dominant one. In this chapter I will first scope out what might constitute a different social order if it were to result in greater equity for those who are most economically marginalised, and then outline approaches to get there. While co-production and asset-based community development are distinct approaches, here I wish to argue that effective asset-based community development processes, as well as standing on their own terms as means of promoting collective citizen action both for problem solving and creating of new possibilities, can often thereafter authorise and therefore democratise co-production. Most definitions of co-production frame the concept within a service paradigm. The definition of co-production by Boyle and Harris (2009), which has gained significant traction in professional and academic arenas, is a case in point: Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change. (p. 11)

In accordance with that definition, it may also be said that co-production seeks to mitigate the problem of professional paternalism by ensuring a parity of esteem between professional service providers and those who consume services. Here, the ‘service-user’ is no longer viewed or treated as a passive receiver of services or subject of expert intervention, but rather as an expert by experience, and therefore an essential partner in the co-design, co-decision making, co-delivery and co-evaluation of more impactful services. Nevertheless, the focus remains firmly on services. Asset-based community development (ABCD) approaches, by contrast, are primarily concerned with citizenship enhancement and precipitating deeper associational life in citizen space. While co-production operates mainly within the sphere of services, ABCD manifests beyond the sphere of services, in citizen space. ABCD also seeks to actively support people to make the journey from being defined as ‘service-users’ to being treated as and feeling like citizens and valued as interdependent members of a natural community. Throughout this chapter I draw a conceptual distinction between organisational spheres and citizen space, and while I acknowledge that both spheres are co-terminus, I argue that it is important to disambiguate the collective role of citizens and that of professionals and their organisations.

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An Overview of Asset-Based Community Development Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) is the main methodological framework through which, in this chapter, I consider co-production and social change more generally. ABCD is about people living in local places taking responsibility for each other and their local resources. It is a description, not a model, of how local residents grow collective efficacy (Sampson et al. 1999) and what they use to do so (McKnight 2009). It is based on anthropological accounts from residents with regards to what they use to become collectively productive and powerful as citizens. ABCD therefore involves paying attention to what is in a local place, not what outside actors think should be there, or what they believe to be absent. The primary goal of an ABCD process is to enhance collective citizen visioning and production through a process that combines four essential elements (Fig. 9.1). When these four elements are features of a given community development effort, it can be said to be an ABCD process.

1. Resources

2. Methods

Six assets or resources enhance local well-being:

Communities use methods that identify and productively connect previously disconnected local resources:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Contribution of Residents Associations Local Institutions Local Places: built and natural environment; ecosystems, biosphere. Exchange: fiscal and non-fiscal Stories that encode cultures, heritage; customs.

• Discover what is there, make the invisible visible • Welcome the stranger • Portray the resources for all to see • Share learning, impact and resources • Celebrate community building efforts • Vision the future from inside out • Connect local resources; especially those that are exiled furthest away from community life.

3. Functions

4. Evaluation

The seven functions are common activities that communities collectively undertake, using the resources/assets above. These functions are bottomup (grassroots), disaggregated, hyper-local, and citizen-led.

Evaluation is totally owned by the community, albeit often with outside support. Residents intentionally reflect on and learn about and from the journey together, so that they are consciously aware of what is impactful. They also evaluate the extent to which they are engaged with the first three essential elements: Resources; Methods; Functions. This process is not an audit, it is developmental, iterative and enabling of mid-course correction where necessary. Particular attention is paid to:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Enabling Health Assuring Security Stewarding Ecology Shaping Local Economies Contributing to Local Food production Raising our Children Co-creating Care

• Gift exchange • Deepening of associational life • Inclusion of the gifts of those who are traditionally excluded

Fig. 9.1 Four essential elements of an asset-based community development process

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ABCD demands an act of radical humility on the part of helping agencies. It’s the opposite of diagnosing, fixing or prescribing. It means shifting attention from ‘deliverables’ to ‘discoverables’; from services per se to broader questions such as ‘what is a good life for you?’ and ‘what would you like to contribute to the well-being of your community?’ ABCD seeks solutions not just beyond ‘services’ but also beyond individual diagnosis, towards more localised, community-wide, socio-political solutions. The logic of shifting the focus from ‘deliverables’ to ‘discoverables’ is grounded in five precepts: 1. Typically, there is a power imbalance between organisations that provide services and individuals and communities that receive them, often most manifest in the areas of investment capital, authority (legal or otherwise), and human and institutional resources and expertise. Notwithstanding this, citizens feel more powerful when they collectivise around their strengths, and connect their local resources. 2. People can’t know what they need from outside actors until they first know what they have within themselves and their communities. The most liberating discovery process starts with an exploration of local assets, not local need. 3. The map that an outside agency/organisation has of a given community is almost never the same as the territory that any given community occupies. 4. If outside actors don’t know the territory, they can’t effectively support the community in accordance with the subsidiarity principle and thus run the risk of causing harm. Authentic co-production is often best advanced when citizens and their communities are enabled to discover, connect and mobilise their assets. This can be, and often is, precipitated by outside actors, but can also be completely community-driven. 5. Communities do not work in silos or in tune with organisational targets or their predefined outcomes. Take health as a case in point: most of the activity that is health producing is done by people who do not think or realise that what they are doing is health producing. In sum, most socio-political challenges are three dimensional: they are personal, institutional and environmental/social. Environmental and social change is not the result of behavioural change, nor does it come about as a consequence of institutional reform. It happens as a result of effective grassroots community building at the neighbourhood level (Monbiot 2016). All that said, if in the pursuit of a better social order, the individual and the organisation are not adequate units of change, then what is? I contend the neighbourhood (by which I mean a small bounded place, tacitly or otherwise defined by the people who reside there) is preferable as the primary unit of socio-economic change; while it may not be sufficient in all instances, it is an essential and much overlooked scale within which to enact democracy.

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A Question of Power and Sequence Despite the importance of place, and citizenship, citizen space is constantly shrinking in modern life (Dunkelman 2014), and what once was addressed by families, kin, neighbours and friends is now increasingly being outsourced to paid professionals (Unwin 2018) and accordingly monetised. Generally, the role of communities has become deflated and that of professionals inflated beyond all reasonable proportions (Vollmer 2010). The prevailing narrative suggests that bigger, better resourced, more professionalised organisational systems equate to better outcomes for all. In ABCD terms at least, it is only by committing to the discovery and enhancement of collective citizen-driven visioning and production (McKnight and Russell 2018)—what citizens can do themselves together—that citizens can make sense of where collaboration (co-production) is warranted. Democracy flourishes not by the growth of top-down services (nor even from those that are delivered co-productively), but primarily by the enhancement of freedom for all from the grassroots up (Lent and Studdert 2019). Put another way, the prime mission of all helping organisations ought to be the increase of interdependence at the centre of community life for everyone across the life course, with services performing subsidiary functions. A Power Analysis Framework Figure 9.2 depicts four modes of social change. This TO, FOR, WITH, BY framework, titled The Helper’s Crossroads , builds on a typology by Slay and Stephens (2013), by adding a fourth domain of progression: DONE BY. Slay and Stephens contrast co-production (‘doing with’), with more traditional approaches which are characterised as ‘doing to’ and ‘doing for’ as follows: 1. Doing to: coercive, educative/directive, seeks to fix/cure. 2. Doing for: less coercive; moving towards deeper involvement, but the professionals remain in control. 3. Doing with: transcends doing to and doing for, by promoting more equal and reciprocal relationships. As well as promoting co-design, codecision making, and ongoing co-evaluation, co-production therefore seeks to augment co-design and to supersede the doing to and for approaches by promoting genuine processes of co-delivering. While useful in demonstrating the virtues of co-production, to my mind this typology does not go far enough in illuminating all the desirable pathways towards a different social order. For example, while it invites citizens into an authentic relationship with professionals and their organisational dynamics, those relationships occur within the limits of the service paradigm, what some refer to as ‘serviceland’ (Hunter and Rowley 2015). The components of a more expansive and interrelated framework, while taking in Slay and Stephens’

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Fig. 9.2 The Helper’s Crossroads 1.0 (Notes Done TO Communities = Everything done is to us and without us. Done FOR Communities = Everything done is done for us, without us. Done WITH Communities = Nothing done for us is done without us. Done BY Communities = Done by us for us.)

three levels, would necessarily include a fourth domain, largely outside the realm of ‘serviceland’, which relates to citizen-led action ranging from neighbourliness to non-violent protests, and including volunteering, voting, organ donation and a myriad of other civic acts. I refer to this fourth domain as ‘DONE BY’ or the ‘By space’. In Fig. 9.2 I also take the liberty of reframing Slay and Stephens’ other three levels, presenting them instead as domains and as a topology (emphasising the way the domains are interrelated) not a typology (depicting distinct categories or levels). I have labelled this new topology The Helper’s Crossroads to reorient us towards a different social order, one which involves identifying and productively connecting unconnected local resources by intentionally adopting the following sequence wherever possible: 1. Starting with what residents can do themselves as an association of citizens, without any outside help. (Done by) 2. Then looking at what they can do with a little outside help. (Done with)

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3. Finally, once these local assets have been fully connected and mobilised, citizens decide collectively on what they want outside actors to do for them. (Done for). The order is critical. When we start with the third step, as often is the case with traditional helping endeavours, we preclude citizen power. In effect, the recommended sequence is a means of operationalising the principle of subsidiarity, whereby an outside actor should perform only those functions which cannot be performed at the local level. Put more plainly, a professional following the principle of subsidiarity would not do for citizens what they can do for themselves or through collective citizen effort. The Helper’s Crossroads 2.0 (Fig. 9.3) illustrates how the four domains can co-exist and enhance each other when the process is citizen led, not expert driven. That schematic proposes that professionals operating within the ‘done with’ space are occupying a gap between institutional/contractual worlds and civic non-contractual worlds. To do so competently requires that they function bi-culturally and bi-lingually across those spaces, as illustrated below (scenario 4) through the story of Jerome Miller. It also means that they are willing to challenge institutional and organisational overreach that comes in the shape of the professional impulse to do to or for people that which they can do themselves within their natural social context using local assets—which would constitute a step back from citizen space.

Fig. 9.3 The Helper’s Crossroads 2.0

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The 2.0 version of The Helper’s Crossroads also makes explicit another role that professionals working in citizen space can usefully take on, the role of the ‘Alongsider’. The Alongsider is not an insider, nor a complete outsider; rather, Alongsiders walk along with communities in a non-prescriptive sense. The key distinction here is that they are not providing a service to or for people, neither are they co-producing a service with people. They are facilitating space for citizens to join together to co-create what matters to them as communities—largely outside of services and contracts—including love, laughter and friendship, all of which are critical determinants of well-being. Indeed sometimes the process of creating space may mean getting out of the way or removing bureaucratic barriers; or the reverse, where what is required are strong governmental regulations to curb predatory market forces. With regards to the wider political sphere, this new topology exposes how misguided and misguiding the ‘big government’ versus ‘small government’ debate really is. The subsidiarity principle is not a matter of keeping government small so that commerce and communities can grow bigger, it is rather a more nuanced deliberation about proportionality, since there are occasions when communities will need governments to be big enough to create a dome of protection around them. And yet other occasions when communities require governments to be small enough to ensure they do not solve problems that are best solved in the commons. Stronger citizens living in flourishing communities can bring great influence to co-production discussions and also take on authorising roles when professionals are required to legitimately do things to or for communities. Such shifts in part occur at a conceptual level, but real impact on the social order can only occur when practice changes in everyday contexts as well as at the organisational level. The next section seeks to translate the above conceptual argument into practical application, by considering how ABCD can act as a buttress to authentic co-production, and how, in its absence, partnership attempts between professionals and citizen can go awry.

Getting Practical: Building Community from the Neighbourhood Out: The Dilemmas and Potential Questions often carry the criteria of their answers. Recently a policy maker asked me this question: ‘How can you use Asset-Based Community Development in communities to address a culture of worklessness?’ Underpinning his inquiry was a genuine desire to co-produce the solution—with local residents—to the problem as he had come to frame it: a culture of worklessness. Questions like this reflect a scarcity mind-set that is dominant in industrialised countries. This question, for example, casts aside the capacities and possibilities of entire neighbourhoods to build up their local economies. It also attributes the ‘problem’ to the people who reside in said neighbourhoods and/or their culture: their way is the ‘workless’ way (Davis 2015).

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In contrast, an ABCD perspective works from the belief that enduring change only happens bottom up; it comes about when local people believe they have capacities and can create power by coming together in deeper community. And that change happens from inside out. The sequence of citizen-led change occurs in this way (see Fig. 9.3: The Helper’s Crossroads 2.0): 1. It starts with the identification, connection and mobilisation of assets that are local and in community control. It puts authority for the invention and production of solutions in the hands of local people, not outside experts. 2. The process then progresses to focus on resources that are local but outside of community control. Bringing these resources under democratic community influence and using them for productive community functions is made more possible because of the above starting point. 3. Ultimately powerful, inclusive communities can confidently move towards assets that are outside of community control and proximity when and if they need to. This will not always be easy and hardly ever conflict-free. This process enables communities that are often defined as problematic and needy to build civic muscle and the collective authority as citizens to produce their own solutions, using local resources where appropriate, and then to draw in and on external support as required. This sequence ensures that when outside solutions come, they match up with the abundance of the community, not its scarcity, and thus conform to the principle of subsidiarity. The ABCD approach stands in stark contrast to a scarcity mind-set (Gerstein 2016), which would have us start, and all too often remain, with a focus solely on external assets, which are neither local nor within community control. The scarcity perspective would have citizens believe that the most valuable resources exist outside of their communities. This is a halfbaked truth, and even if it were completely true, liberating those external resources without first liberating local capacities routinely results in top-down, bureaucratic solutions that simply do not work. It is important to note that co-production efforts can be as easily imbued with scarcity-based perspectives as they can with an abundance mind-set. Deconstructing ‘Worklessness’ To begin to try to deconstruct the supposed ‘culture of worklessness’ presented at the start of this section we must understand that it emerges from a deficit-based view of the world. Hence before we can question the question, we must question the ‘nest’, the worldview, from which this question and others like it are hatched.

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The ideological framing of the opening question ‘can ABCD be used to address worklessness?’ is questionable and unhelpful, at five separate levels: 1. It maps the territory negatively, and then assumes the map is the territory. 2. It fails to get to the root of the problem, because it mistakes the symptoms for the cause. 3. It creates a dangerous dichotomy in thinking about people living in economic isolation, where the only options are perverse: they are either (a) deviant (lazy or incompetent) and therefore about to defraud the system or require punishment, or (b) discriminated against and in need of rescue vis a vis programmes and services. Either way they are powerless and in need of custodianship. 4. It suggests that the best solutions come from outside experts. Yet according to the U.K Office of National Statistics/Labour market trends, people are four times more likely to find work through friends than through a job centre (Brook 2005). 5. It suggests the problem of ‘worklessness’ is persistent, pernicious, permanent and pervasive. ‘It’s part of the “culture” now’. Let’s go through each of these one by one. The Map Is Not the Territory Firstly, the question maps the territory negatively, and then assumes the map is the territory: ‘a culture of worklessness’. Why not a latent culture of ‘timefulness’ or of ‘skills contribution’? After all, the two ‘commodities’ economically marginalised communities have in abundance are time and skills. Fails to Get to the Root of the Problem Secondly, it goes on to mistake the symptoms of a collapse of local community culture for a culture of worklessness, thereby failing to get to the root of the issue. We can only get to the root by asking radical and disruptively innovative questions. That process starts by looking upstream to understand what has caused the density of so-called worklessness in the first place, or for that matter the density of low educational attainment, drug use, or any of the myriad other maladies facing such communities. Misattributing such symptoms, and by implication their root causes, to the current culture of a community puts communities and indeed professional helpers in a developmental cul de sac, where the remedies start to define the maladies: unemployment is no longer a lack of sufficient income; it is redefined as a need for job mentoring, or for welfare payments, since those are the service/programme solutions on offer.

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A better question therefore is: ‘How can we support local residents in any given place to re-cultivate a culture of community?’ And, if we want to be really radical: ‘How can we support local residents in any given place to recultivate a culture of community, despite decades of poor policy decisions, corporate greed, endemic individualism, the ravages of globalisation, and the tyranny of experts that have eclipsed their indigenous local culture and rich producing capacities?’ This line of questioning shifts the unit of change beyond the individual’s perceived deficits and the institution’s heroic remedies towards defining the neighbourhood as the primary unit of change. By viewing the challenge of unemployment through the neighbourhood lens we can come to clearly see that it is not a behavioural issue or lifestyle choice; it is a complex social, political and environmental issue. Deviant or Deserving? The third fatal flaw in the question is that it sets communities up to be seen and to see themselves as either deviant (Russell 2010) or deserving. They are seen as deviant in the sense that they are workless due to some assumed flaw in their personality, behaviour or moral character. Or they are judged to be deserving in that they are considered to be the sum of their assigned deficiencies and thus more likely to be victims, or easy prey to external forces such as industrialisation because of their supposed deficits and dysfunctions. In other words, they need to be rescued. Both perspectives emanate from the same post-colonial root, where the helper has everything of value to give to the ‘helped’, and the ‘helped’ have nothing of value to offer in return for themselves. However you cut it, the ‘helped’ are ‘needy’, not needed. The Tyranny of Experts: Outside Experts Know Best Fourthly, the question places the solution to ‘worklessness’ in the hands of some external ‘expert’. Asking, ‘How can you address a culture of worklessness?’ sweeps the tacit knowledge, skills, talents and capacities of the local people, their associations, cultural heritage, environment and their current local economies aside. The tyranny of experts prizes the experts and their ‘programmes’, ‘projects’ or ‘models’ above people, place and culture, not to mention the local economy however beleaguered. The ‘just-so story’ of modern human services has it that enduring change is just around the corner, and it will come in the shape of some external authority who will stay faithful to this model or that to lead the poor beleaguered masses out of poverty. Here the tyranny of the expert is in the fact that to receive help one must engage in custodial submission, the expert is not de facto a tyrant. Diverse expertise is essential to well-functioning societies. The question is how can we ensure expert knowledge is used proportionately, democratically and transparently?

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The 5 P’s: The Problem IS Persistent, Pernicious, Permanent and Pervasive Finally, the question plays to generalities that steal away all hope of a local handmade and homemade solution, suggesting instead that the community is ensnared by ‘a culture of worklessness’. Soon people start assuming ‘everyone around here is unemployed’; the assumption is that as well as being pervasive, the situation is permanent and persistent. Eventually people lose hope, and start to believe that that’s just the way things are around here. The perniciousness of it all takes hold: onlookers start thinking that ‘that place is a backwater of pathology’, and so too do the people who live there; they internalise the map that others have drawn for them. Here is an alternative angle to seriously consider: who says worklessness is a problem in all instances? Typically, the fundamental issue for people who are not working is a lack of sufficient income, in other words the absence of an economic floor that prevents them from falling into crisis. When, as a society, we only value people for their monetised contributions, we consequently devalue the contributions of children and young people, retired people, indeed all who are not working in paid employment for whatever reason. There is a disturbing paradox at the heart of this deficit dialectic, which is that the root issue in terms of worklessness—the lack of sufficient income— remains largely unaddressed. Indeed, most of the money intended to reduce poverty leaves the neighbourhoods with the majority of the salaried staff paid to address ‘worklessness’ when they go home to their respective communities of place. A Tale of One Community through Different Lenses: Scarcity vs. Abundance Put simply, when we think about unemployment, or any issue for that matter, we must first take care to choose the lens through which to make shared sense/meaning of the issue before us. To illustrate, let us play a scenario out from each of these vantage points: Scarcity versus Abundance. Scenario One: Countering a Culture of Worklessness Through the Scarcity Lens In a local neighbourhood, where some believe there is a culture of worklessness. A local comprehensive community consultation (LCCC) found that a high number of residents were concerned about the lack of facilities and activities for young girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen. The response by helping institutions was impressively rapid. Taking this finding as their call to action, they proceeded to establish a task force, which included local people that they referred to as ‘experts by experience’. This task force also had representatives from all agencies, especially those that provided family support and young peoples’ services. The task force members agreed on an ‘inter-agency, wrap-around, coordinated, integrated, seamless, no-wrong door, person-centred, co-produced approach’ to developing programmes for young girls which would be rolled out before the school summer holidays.

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The programme targeted the so-called most ‘at-risk young girls’ in the neighbourhood, and provided a range of therapeutic and occupational supports; there also were intentionally designed work-experience programmes outside of the neighbourhood to raise the girls’ ‘aspiration levels’. Trained professionals formed trusting relationships with the girls to ensure that the experience was co-designed, and the programme evaluation showed that those who participated had increased in confidence and life-skills. How did it work out in terms of the relationship between the young people and the wider community? Not so well: not one new trusting relationship was formed between these girls and productive adults living in the neighbourhood. Most of the girls asserted that their personal aspirations had indeed increased, but that in fact was code for saying they were now more determined than ever to get out of that neighbourhood, to flee from its ‘culture of worklessness’. Scenario Two: Connecting Local Gifts to Nurture Local Economy Through the Lens of Abundance In a local neighbourhood, which some have labelled as having a ‘ culture of worklessness’ A couple of people on each street have been having conversations with their neighbours about what they care about enough to act on, and what gifts, skills, knowledge and passions they have that could be useful towards those ends. They didn’t have any predefined agenda, aside from trying to weave the community together, but they were weary of being co-opted to address questionable questions like ‘worklessness’, which they considered to be a harmful and disabling label. One of the concerns that several mothers in the neighbourhood raised during these conversations was that ‘it’s coming close to summer and my girls have nothing productive to do around here’. They felt the absence of some meaningful ways for their daughters to engage in community life, and productive activity generally. Their fear was that if this issue wasn’t addressed, they said, ‘they’ll fall in with the wrong crowd’. At first, each of these mothers raised this concern independently or through one-to-one conversations, then some of their neighbours soon joined up to take action. What happened was that some of their neighbours were busy trying to better connect up the neighbourhood by finding out what people cared about, and what capacities, skills and knowledge people had to tap into to take on some civic functions. Some of these local resident connectors brought seven women together around a kitchen table simply to talk to each other and explore what they might do together that they couldn’t do alone. They started a conversation that also soon included their daughters, and other connected neighbours pitched in their knowledge of what else was going on out there in the neighbourhood, and who else could be helpful. That conversation identified that what the girls wanted was activity that was real,

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not choreographed or over-programmed, and not aimed at trying to fix them. They wanted something that would enable them to be useful and make a genuine contribution. What these girls needed was to be needed, not by outside professionals but by their families and neighbours. They started to meet weekly around that kitchen table for several months, and they thought deeply about the questions they wanted to address. Then they looked at what local resources they could influence that would make for a fun, productive summer break from school. They chose not to focus on ‘worklessness’, and not to refer their daughters to professionally run programmes. Instead one girl said, ‘You know people think nobody works around here, but lots do’, which led to another girl suggesting that they ask their neighbours who were working to take each girl to work with them for a day throughout the summer. The community has a population of about 1000 households and the unemployment rate is extremely high right now: 37% of the working-age population. That said, each evening between Easter and the summer holidays that year these young people and their moms spent time thinking about what they had to share, and what they wanted to learn, as well as finding over 100 local neighbours who worked in a wide range of jobs. They spoke to every one of them and got to know them, not just by their job title, but also by their interests, passions and hopes for their shared community. Then they asked each of those working neighbours whether they would be willing to take them to work one day over the summer. Nearly everyone said yes, and they were flattered to be asked. And so, a community initiative that was not a programme at all was born, connecting the assets of local people and then going outwards to engage with the assets of each of their places of work, many of which were institutions outside the community, including police stations, hospitals, churches, for-profit businesses, not-for profits, and more. Now the community was outreaching the institutions, and suddenly the rules of the game had been turned upside down. But the girls and their mothers didn’t just ask to connect with neighbours working in paid employment; they also connected with people who contribute outside the marketplace within their own community; they sought out and eventually hung out with artists, community gardeners, craft beer enthusiasts, storytellers and many more amazing people. The community in the Scenario Two is no different from the first. In fact, they are the same people, in the same place. What was different was the practice and perspective, and the consequence of playing out the scenario through the lens of abundance. Through that lens local people became the exception to the prevailing rule ‘Nobody works around here, and the only way that that will change is if someone from outside with expertise comes into reverse that cultural trend’.

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‘Nobody works around here’ was not originally the community’s rule; it had been imposed from outside. Following that imposition, many local residents, especially young people, had internalised that scarcity map of the community. But just because you swallow someone else’s poison does not make it yours. The antidote in this instance, and many like it, is to start with what you have, where you are, not with a view to settling for what you have, or accepting what you’ve been given, but so that you can make things better, and build the power to change from inside out. Today this community, by acting through a lens of abundance, has created a different script, for themselves and future generations. Of course, the kids in this neighbourhood still fight with their parents, make decisions about illicit substances, duck out of school on occasion and struggle to find jobs, but they also have networks that, like a complex web, have woven new possibilities for a sustainable and sustaining livelihood. They now have a context within which they can commit acts of community building towards that and other shared ends. Today these kids are no longer leaders of tomorrow, they are leaders of today; they are no longer youth at risk, they are youth ‘at promise’. They are living proof that it takes a child to raise a village. There is a third possible scenario, a powerful amplification of the second, involving the assistance of a community animator (a paid post involving a skilled community worker). In this case, the animator’s role is to provide support to local resident connectors to reach even more people and to be intentional about including residents at risk of not having their gifts recognised and received. The three scenarios are all rooted in a place-based context: in the first, things are done to and for targeted residents in a deficit-based, prescriptive and service-oriented manner; in the second, an asset-based community development approach is employed by resident themselves; the third portrays the efforts of residents working in an asset-based community-centred way enhanced but not displaced by the supports of a paid community animator who is answerable to the local community. Still, a critical question remains unanswered: Is it possible for a professional in a senior leadership position removed from any particular community to support an ABCD approach with a view to creating more authentic co-production opportunities? In turning to this question, the next section centres on what organisational leaders can do to precipitate community-led alternatives to traditional organisationally driven programmes and services.

Shifting from Institutional Reform to Precipitating Community-Led Alternatives There are many radicals who work effectively within their bureaucratic boundaries, but Jerome (Jerry) Miller was exemplary in precipitating community-led change in the ‘By space’, as an alternative to traditional organisational responses.

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In the late sixties, Jerry was an associate professor of criminology in the School of Social Work at Ohio State University. He was well known for his radical views on reforming penitentiaries and reformatories for young people and adults alike. For example, he thought that sending young men to a reformatory was the worst thing you could do to keep them from becoming repeat offenders. Jerry was at his most vocal around the time a series of scandals was breaking about the child abuse and brutality in the eleven reformatories for young offenders in the State of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent took the view that what was needed was a ‘root and branch’ reform of the whole system, and in 1969 after interviewing a number of likely candidates his people settled on Jerry as the best reformer for the job. The thing is, Jerry wasn’t a reformer, he was a radical—he believed that institutional reform misses the point. Nevertheless, Jerry was quick to introduce best practices from the world of criminology into the Massachusetts system and in two years as head of the juvenile correction system he reformed the reformatories, and consequently they were among the best in the United States. Yet Jerry was keen to assess the impact of these changes on the lives of the young people they served and his research discovered that little had changed for the young people, except for experiencing less abuse while incarcerated. All of the institutional reform, the professionalising of the staff, and so on, had done little to change the reality for these young people when they stepped outside the correctional institution. The quality of the programmes had improved the quality of life inside the institution for the young people the programmes were aimed at, but had no effect outside. Reform of the institutions was clearly not the answer (Miller 1991). So Jerry set his face against institutional reform and began to seek solutions outside the world of organisational systems completely. Up to that point, year on year the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services was spending in excess of $10,000 incarcerating and failing each of these young people. At that time, Jerry noted wryly, that ‘that was enough to send a kid to Harvard, provide a generous weekly allowance and pay for weekly therapy sessions’. He began actively seeking community alternatives to these wasteful and failing institutional programmes. For example, he experimented with an initiative whereby previously incarcerated young people and college students became roommates and lived together for an extended period of time. The logic was pretty straightforward: as they got to know each other it would become clearer to each of them what they could do together. Jerry’s radical nature showed itself most clearly in how he was able to invite innovation from others. He was far less interested in designing creative initiatives, such as the roommate experiment, than in creating the context within which people could come up with their own community alternatives to organisational systems-based responses. Essentially, he invited regular people to think about what they would do to support these young people to recover and get

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more deeply connected, something that didn’t involve incarceration. Significantly, he had some resources that he was prepared to invest. So, the message contained the postscript ‘And I’ll pay for it’. One of the standout stories involves one of the college students rooming with a kid from a reformatory. The student convinced Jerry to pick up the tab for both his and his roommate’s plane ticket, plus travel expenses, and the young men disappeared for a year travelling around the world. Can you think of any senior public servant who would have said yes to such a proposition? Jerry did, and it was cheap at twice the price. The cost was around $3000 each for the tickets, plus about $5000 in spending money. So, for $11,000 two people’s lives were transformed. It was an outlay that was on average cheaper than incarceration and considerably more successful and humane. Not surprisingly, the idea did not take off. The resistance mainly centred around the belief that such radical approaches would have made a significant number of professionals redundant. Of course, the objection was not so plainly articulated; instead other ‘industry experts’ argued that the risks of such an approach were intolerably high. It is always the case that mistakes made in community are more apparent and less acceptable than those made by ‘the system’. Of course, Jerry is not the only institutional radical the world has ever known. Like many others he made a habit, or a practice you might say, of doing certain things. These can summed-up with three key precepts: 1. Relocate authority There are certain things that only communities can do; beyond a certain point, institutions become at best non-productive and at worst counterproductive, and at this point a community response is the only viable one: the By Space. 2. Reduce dependency on services by increasing interdependency at the centre of community life. The mantra of institutional radicals is clarion: if we are ethically to reduce dependency on our services and institutionalisation more broadly, we must increase interdependency in community life. 3. Organisations have functions and so too do communities Organisational systems and institutions are not designed to care. People care; organisational systems and structures produce services to a standardised format and are structured to enable the few to control the many, hence ensuring consistency of quality but not necessarily the quality of life for each individual they serve.

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Conclusion Whether the issue is criminality, so-called worklessness, homelessness, or any of the myriad of social maladies, the critique drawn above stands. Authentic co-production accelerates when prefaced by citizen-to-citizen co-creation and community building: ABCD. This conclusion does not foreclose on the possibility that authentic co-production cannot otherwise happen, but it does seek to make plain that co-production is best authenticated by establishing the extent to which it accords with the principle of subsidiarity. And subsidiarity, while aided by more facilitative and collaborative approaches from organisational and institutional domains, rests more fundamentally on the collective agency of citizens: since a professional can never know what a citizen needs until the citizen first knows what assets they have. Hence, I have argued that without the foundations of strong collective citizenship, co-production runs the risk of falling into one or more common traps: 1. Not adequately challenging the larger implicit (and sometimes explicit) and wrongly held notion that people are economically marginalised because of personal failings, rather than as a result of systems and policies that are structured to maintain a class system that benefits some at the expense of others. 2. Failing to acknowledge that much social change, and that which determines a good life for individual citizens in general terms, and communities more broadly, has little to do with institutional or organisational reform (Holt-Lundstad et al. 2015), or professional intervention, or services of any kind for that matter (Cahn 2000), and mostly is predicated on associational and civic life on its own ground, separate from institutional life (Barber 2004). This hyper-local civic renewal, while seeking to put citizens at the centre of democracy, also argues that, for this to happen, institutions and professionals need to cede significant ground and power and accept and actively take on a subsidiary role. This is particularly true when the ground does not require professional intervention in the first place, not even co-productively. 3. Failing to acknowledge the power asymmetry that typically exists between professionals and those they serve, which can mean that, while the narrative of co-production is sustained, no real change in the social order is likely. In sum: there are certain things that cannot be done either by citizens or by professionals working alone or at cross-purposes to each other. These things lend themselves to co-production. But there are many other things that are best done by citizens in their own right, and on their own collective terms (Boyte 1980). These community-building efforts do not require coproduction, or any other service-based response. What they often do require

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of organisations is a facilitative or precipitating role which is not co-production but the creation of space or the removal of barriers to citizen participation. Avoiding the common traps in the pursuit of a better social order warrants more emphasis on citizenship, community building, deinstitutionalisation and the promotion of interdependence at the centre of community life. A secondary gain would be more authentic co-production. A better social order necessitates a genuine commitment across all sectors of society to the nurturing of citizen-led action, place-based investment, and the restoration of the commons and the cooperative ethic. In the final analysis, in a democracy, citizens are the primary inventors; professionals are there to support that invention and to offer supplementary resources to enable, protect and extend it, never to replace, demean or overwhelm it. When that social contract is well defined, the foundations for authentic co-production, and indeed transparent social protection and service delivery, are laid and democracy is enabled to work as it should towards a better social order for all.

References Barber, B. (2004). Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age. 20th anniv. ed. Oakland, CA: University of California. Originally published 1984. Boyle, D. & Harris, M. (2009). The challenge of co-production: How equal partnerships between professionals and the public are crucial to improving public services. Discussion paper. National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. http://assetbasedconsulting.co.uk/uploads/publications/The_Challenge_of_ Co-production.pdf. Boyte, H. (1980). The backyard revolution: Understanding the new citizen movement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Brook, K. (2005). Labour market participation: The influence of social capital. Office for National Statistics, Labour Market Trends. http://www.social-capital.net/docs/ lm_social_capital.pdf. Cahn, E. (2000). No more throwaway people: The co-production imperative. Washington, DC: Essential Books. Davis, A. (2015). Don’t blame the poor for the faults of our economy. https://www. epi.org/blog/dont-blame-the-poor-for-the-faults-of-our-economy/. Dunkelman, M.J. (2014). The vanishing neighbor: The transformation of American community. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Gerstein, J. (2016). Approaching marginalized populations from an asset rather than a deficit model of education. https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/ 2016/05/08/approaching-marginalized-populations-from-an-asset-rather-than-adeficit-model/. Gutierrez, G. (2004). The power of the poor in history. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Originally published 1983. Holt-Lundstad, J., et al. (2015, March 11). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1745691614568352.

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Hunter, S. & Rowley, D. (2015). Social work with people with learning difficulties. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Lent, A. & Studdert, J. (2019). The community paradigm: Why public services need radical change and how it can be achieved. London: New Local Government Network. McKnight, J. (2009). Community capacities and community necessities. Speech presented at the From Clients to Citizens Forum, Coady International Institute, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia. https://resources.depaul. edu/abcd-institute/publications/publications-by-topic/Documents/McKnight% 20Speech%207-09.pdf. McKnight, J. & Russell, C. (2018). The four essential elements of an asset-based community development process: What is distinctive about an asset-based community development process? DePaul University, ABCD Institute paper. https://resources.depaul.edu/abcd-institute/publications/publicationsby-topic/Documents/4_Essential_Elements_of_ABCD_Process.pdf. Miller, J. (1991). Last one over the wall: The Massachusetts experiment in closing reform schools. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Monbiot, G. (2016, February 8). This is how people can truly take back control: From the bottom up. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2017/feb/08/take-back-control-bottom-up-communities. Russell, C. (2010, September). Making the case for an asset-based community development (abcd) approach to probation: From reformation to transformation. Irish Probation Journal, 7. https://resources.depaul.edu/abcd-institute/public ations/publications-by-topic/Documents/Making%20the%20Case%20for%20an% 20ABCD%20Approach%20to%20Probation%20From+Reformation+to+Transform ation,+CORMAC+RUSSELL(1).pdf. Sampson, R.J., Morenoff, J.D. & Earls, F. (1999). Beyond social capital: Spatial dynamics of collective efficacy for children. American Sociological Review, 64(5), 633. Slay, J. & Stephens, L. (2013). Co-production in mental health: A literature review. New Economics Foundation, London. https://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/ca0975 b7cd88125c3e_ywm6bp3l1.pdf. Unwin, J. (2018). The story of our times: Shifting power, bridging divides, transforming society. Summary report, UK Civil Society Futures. https://civilsociety futures.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2018/11/Civil-Society-Futures__TheStory-of-Our-Future.pdf. Vollmer, J. (2010). Schools cannot do it alone: Building public support for America’s public schools. Fairfield, IA: Enlightenment Press.

CHAPTER 10

Law and Co-production: The Importance of Citizenship Values Anthony M. Bertelli and Silvia Cannas

Public services1 have long been characterised by the contraposition of two kinds of actors (Sharp 1980). Professionals, are organised in administrative or technical organisations (Alford 1998) and charged of achieving outcomes in the public interest (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012b) and, community members , who realise those outcomes. The significant growth of government expenditure arose from the efforts of postwar governments ‘to address and try to solve more numerous, more complex and more interrelated’ problems (Mosher 1980, 541, 545), increased rigidity of budget constraints and a need to restrain tax increases amidst evidence of ineffective publicly provided services (Parks et al. 1981, 1001). These concomitant forces have created strong incentives for policymakers to consider new strategies for providing public services. Beginning in the 1970s, co-production began its ascent as such a strategy. The term, coined by Nobel Laureate Eleanor Ostrom to describe (and delimit) 1 Following Osborne and Strokosch (2013), by ‘public services’ we mean services

‘created through the public policy process and regulated by (central or local) government but which can be provided by a range of “public service organizations” (PSOs) in the public, third and private sectors’ (Osborne and Strokosch 2013). A. M. Bertelli (B) · S. Cannas Bocconi University, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. M. Bertelli Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

© The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_10

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the involvement of citizens in the production of public services (Pestoff 2012, 1105), has mutated into ‘a buzzword for a set of instruments and ways of working that are meant to produce better outcomes in terms of service quality and efficiency’ through the involvement of community members and civil society organisations (Ewert and Evers 2012, 61). Despite numerous attempts to identify the core traits of co-production, the concept remains heterogeneous and risks being marshalled in the service of too many different purposes (Verschuere et al. 2012). If co-production is to be understood legally, this state of affairs is quite problematic. To understand its legal foundations, we begin by reviewing how the definition and attributes of co-production has evolved over time in scholarly discourse. We focus on those aspects that, at least from a legal perspective, remain impractical. Words and language play a key role in any legal debate (Williams 1945) and, for this reason we cannot proceed with rigorous legal argumentation before having made co-production, as a concept, more precise. In reconstructing co-production to give it legal meaning, we distinguish between its subjective and the objective components. Objective attributes of the activity being co-produced make it possible to distinguish co-production from other types of interactions between the public administration and the civil society. Subjective attributes identify as a co-producer an individual interacting with the public administration for the provision of public services. We are not only interested in identifying co-producers—particularly when an individual does not benefit directly from the co-produced service—but also legal principles that legitimise, and in some cases require, involvement in co-production. We introduce the concept of proximity as crucial element of a coproduction scheme, and centre it on the idea of administrative citizenship, which differs from the common conception of citizenry and derives from an individual’s residency within a territory and her belonging to a community. Administrative citizenship, as we conceive it, bestows rights, but also obligations. Aware of the peculiarities of different legal systems that complicate a general claim about the concept, we use Italian law to identify a series of principles that can, in the abstract, legitimise the powers and duties that co-production embodies. While we are moved by the sentiment that coproduction can play an important role ‘in the renewal of both democratic political systems and the welfare state’ (Pestoff et al. 2006, 593), we hope that our essay, apart from encouraging a larger legal debate on co-production, can also improve empirical research through conceptual clarity (Verschuere et al. 2012).

Conceptualising Co-production Co-production as a phenomenon predates its terminology (Brandsen and Honingh 2016) and scholars have long tried to identify its boundaries as a concept (Brudney and England 1983; Ostrom 1996; Rich 1981; Whitaker

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1980). Percy (1984) claimed that co-production required that ‘both consumer and regular producers undertake efforts to produce the same good or service’, without the requirement that ‘productive efforts [be] taken through direct interaction of regular and consumer producers, only that their actions are undertaken more or less simultaneously’ (Percy 1984, 433). Ostrom’s (1996) description of co-production as ‘a process through which inputs from individuals who are not “in” the same organization are transformed into goods and services’ (Ostrom 1996) meant a shift from a customer model of public administration (Alford 2002a) to one privileging the active citizen. Bovaird and Loeffler (2012b) and Brandsen and Honingh (2016) clarified this transformation, explicitly invoking the concept of citizenship.2 A contemporary report by Boyle and Harris (2013), published by the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA), enlarged the platea of participants in coproduction processes to include ‘people using services, their families and their neighbours’ (Boyle and Harris 2013). Co-production, so conceived, involves a wider public beyond direct service users (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012b). Yet a form of citizenship is not required in these arguments. Alford (2002a) recalls that previous literature questioned the appropriateness of the concept of the customer in the public sphere (Moe 1994; Pegnato 1997), arguing that it devalues citizens (Patterson 1998), ‘reducing them to passive recipients of the services rather than active agents’ (Alford 2002a). Although the notion of citizenship has profound legal implications, we believe it is crucial to distinguish a form of public administration in which the state directly provides for citizens from one in which professionals and community members are—if not as peers3 —co-operating to produce outcomes. Coproduction is no longer restricted to the service delivery phase (Brudney and England 1983), but also involves a range of activities such as co-planning, co-design, co-prioritisation, co-financing, co-management and co-assessment (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012a, b). This larger ambit makes it timely to provide a legal basis for this new form of interaction between individuals or communities and the public sphere. While specific legal systems and policy domains must establish more tailored views, we focus on an abstract conception that is capable both of explaining and legitimising existing and future co-production activity. 2 For

Brandsen and Honingh (2016), ‘Coproduction is a relationship between a paid employee of an organization and (groups of) individual citizens that require a direct and active contribution from these citizens to the work of the organization’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016).

3 In

the definition published within the NESTA report, co-production has been defined as a way of delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. However, Bovaird and Loeffler (2012b) contest this definition because the condition of an equal and reciprocal relationship is rarely met. For this reason, they take a ‘slightly different stance’ and adopted a definition of co-production that, while emphasising the reciprocity of the relationship between ‘the public sector and citizens’, is ‘less anchored to equality in relationships’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012b, 1121).

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The risk of over broadly classifying the activities of co-production, we contend, can be mitigated by circumscribing its objective, rather than subjective, attributes. This raises important distinctions among co-production, parallel productions4 and ancillary activities5 that have been recognised by Rosentraub and Warren (1987) and Pestoff (2006). The literature also has helped to define scope conditions by considering what cannot be considered co-production (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012a; Brandsen and Honingh 2016; Pestoff 2006).6 Yet much remains to be clarified regarding the subjective attributes of co-production. In particular, who is involved in providing ‘active input’ remains ambiguous.7 Brandsen and Pestoff (2006) contend that the citizen, acting as co-producer, can be a direct recipient of the service, but this is not a necessary condition.8 When can an individual co-produce, but not benefit? Consider the scenario in which a flood occurs and, to respond to this emergency, the public administration engages both professionals and individuals in the response effort. Further suppose that the public administration supervises and finances the activities in which individuals are involved. With previous scholarship, we believe that if the individuals working with the administration belong to the community in which the services are provided, then co-production is happening. But what if those individuals came from other communities, regions or states? Our response to this question introduces the concept of proximity as a means of establishing the co-productive relationship between individuals and the public administration.

4 Parallel

productions are those services similar to those provided by public agencies, but are produced without the co-operation with public agencies (Rosentraub and Warren 1987, 76).

5 Ancillary

actions are expected forms of behaviour for citizens, such as reporting crimes, obeying laws, and following regulations (Rosentraub and Warren 1987, 76).

6 Among

the others, Brandsen and Honingh (2016) claimed that co-production is about collaboration between public agencies and citizens for the production or provision of public services, thus excluding from its action field those interorganizational collaborations that Brandsen and Pestoff (2006) refer to as ‘co-management’ and ‘co-governance’. Moreover, they use a narrow interpretation of co-production, that does not include advocacy or inputs outside an organization to avoid that co-production becomes ‘virtually synonymous with participation in a broader sense’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 428). Pestoff (2006), on the other hand, identifies the main requisites of co-production in the public financing and supervision of the services in which citizens-co-producers are involved.

7 ‘Coproduction

necessitates of an active input by individual citizens in shaping the service they personally receive. This distinguishes coproduction from passive clientelism or consumerism: it is not enough simply to receive or use a product’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 428).

8 ‘For

instance, the participation of family members of children has been an often-studied topic’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 428).

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Proximity and Co-production Co-production requires proximity to link and to justify the engagement of a community member with direct service recipients precisely because the effects of co-production can extend beyond direct beneficiaries. Proximity might be relational —the citizen participates in the provision of a public service by virtue of a personal relationship with a direct recipient—or spatial —a direct beneficiary of the service is a member of the proximate individual’s local community. Individual motivations to co-produce are multi-faceted (Alford 2002b; van Eijk and Steen 2014) and are at least partially motivated by altruism (Alford and Hughes 2008). However, considering that one’s local community is the first place in which an interaction between citizens and public services takes shape, it is not hard to reach a claim that when the benefits of co-production are received by individuals other than the co-producer. A proximate nonbeneficiary still benefits. That is, the flood victim and the local resident whose home was spared both benefit from the recovery effort. The contribution of the proximate non-beneficiary not only makes her more aware of how to use the service (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012b, 1125), but also allows her to shape services according to her own needs, values and priorities. The proximate nonbeneficiary may be a future direct beneficiary, but this is not the case for a non-proximate non-beneficiary. To continue our example, the resident of a distant region returns home after helping with the flood recovery and does not benefit from those services upon return,9 behaving as a volunteer than as a co-producer. Proximity is a parsimonious requirement, linking two core attributes of citizenship—connectedness and territory10 —with co-production (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012b). This also serves to ground co-production in key principles of European administrative law. On the one hand, administrative law embraces the idea that the government most proximate to the community in need should be responsible for administrative action (Rossi 2017, 115; see also Chieppa and Giovagnoli 2011, 125). On the other hand, the principle of vertical subsidiarity is becoming established in an increasing number of contexts, ‘from the international level to the internal context of many entities, including states’ (Balboni 2019). Codified in Article 5, Paragraph 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and some national Constitutions (e.g., Germany and Italy), vertical subsidiarity ‘contains a clear limit to state intervention or other forms of centralised power arrangements and holds the 9 It

may be argued that the societal impact of the flood recovery will be felt at a broader level than the region, but it would be a difficult conception of co-production to accept if it were to be mandated as broadly, say, as required national military service.

10 The connection between the notion of territory and citizenship can be traced to the origins of the term. As mentioned by Turner (1993): ‘The Western notion of citizenship is closely associated with […] membership of a city […]. Thus, the French term citoyen is derived from cité, which refers merely to an assembly of citizens who enjoy certain limited rights within a city. In English, equally the idea of citizen is closely associated with that of a denizen, and both indicate the idea of living a city’ (Turner 1993, 9).

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promise to enable individual citizens to directly engage with actual problemsolving on a day-to-day basis’ (Mulé and Walzenbach 2019, 142). Evans and Zimmermann (2014, 2) try to reconstruct the philosophical arguments behind the subsidiarity principle, and contend that to encourage individual participation in community action—‘one of the greatest aspirations of the citizen’ and their ‘cooperation in the achievement of the common good’—it is necessary to ‘rearrange the vertical levels of government in order to give priority to those with the greatest proximity to the citizen’. They contend that ‘[w]hen applied to the workings of civil government’, vertical ‘subsidiarity aims to empower citizens and enhance democracy by encourgaging decision-making closer to the region or problem at hand’ (Evans and Zimmermann 2014, 2). In keeping with these principles, our view of co-production transforms community members from passive to active participation in the administrative process and in the creation of both private and public value (Moore 1994). It is sensible to talk about a co-production process if and only if a community member, through her participation in the process, contributes to satisfying a need of her own or of a person in her relational entourage, or if there exists a territorial linkage between community member and the place where direct beneficiaries are located. Proximity, then, clearly distinguishes co-production from volunteerism.

Citizens as Co-producers Essentials of citizenship are crucial not only in identifying co-production, but also for understanding the relationship among the professionals and community members in public service provision more generally. We thus disagree with Alford’s (2002b) critique that co-production theorists like Percy (1984) and Rich (1981) ‘have confused clients with citizens’. He contends that apart from receiving different kinds of values,11 the relationship among government organisations and citizens is structured differently than the relationship between those organisations and clients: the former relationship is collective and the latter individualistic.12 While strongly related to the notion of the collective, citizenship is, above all, an individual legal status (Romeo 2011, 5; Grifone Baglioni 2011). It is through ‘a collection of rights and obligations’ that an individual relates to both her community and her state (Turner 1997). When considering how individuals interact with the public administration, Alford’s (2002b) argument seems based on outdated premises. First, the claim 11 ‘What

the citizenry receives is public value, whereas a client receives private value’ (Alford 2002b, 34).

12 ‘A citizen is part of a collective “we”, who express their aspirations through the manifold “voice” mechanisms, such as voting and other forms of political participation, which make up democratic political processes. By contrast, the clients act (or are acted on) as individuals who signal their preferences, if at all, through market purchases or surrogates such as complaint departments or consumer surveys, and in any case the service is often determined for them by governments’ (Alford 2002b, 34).

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that citizenship is mainly associated with the formation of a collective will through the democratic political process eschews several extant variants of citizenship. On the one hand, depending on the historical circumstances in the specific country considered, citizenship involves more or less active participation (Turner 1990, 1993). On the other hand, citizenship assumes different contours and content depending on the object of the legal norms that define it (Police 2016). Moreover, there may be normative forecasts—in soft or hard law—that explicitly provide for citizens’ participation in design, planning, prioritisation and other aspects of co-producing public services. Three examples of co-production in law are instructive. First, the Care and Support Statutory Guidance (CSSG)13 issued by the UK Department of Health aims towards ‘providing local authorities with the information they need about how they should meet the legal obligations placed on them by the Care Act 201414 and the regulations’. The CSSG provides: In developing and delivering preventative approaches to care and support, local authorities should ensure that individuals are not seen as passive recipients of support services, but are able to design care and support based around achievement of their goals. Local authorities should, where possible, actively promote participation in providing interventions that are co-produced with individuals, families, friends, carers and the community. ‘Co-production’ is when an individual influences the support and services received, or when groups of people get together to influence the way that services are designed, commissioned and delivered. Such interventions can contribute to developing individual resilience and help promote self-reliance and independence, as well as ensuring that services reflect what the people who use them want. (emphasis added)

Second, the US Health Services Amendments Act of 198615 requires a Community Health Centre (CHC)16 ‘to have a governing board composed of individuals a majority of whom are being served by the project and who, as a group, represent the residents of the community’ (Stivers 1990, 98, emphasis added). Third, beyond the Italian constitution, code section 297/1994 concerning education provides for the establishment of parents’ and students’ 13 This text is particularly relevant as, to the best of our knowledge, it is one of the rare cases in which the term ‘co-production’ is used explicitly in a legislative context. Indeed, despite the not negligible amount of academic discussion on the concept, this term seems to be almost absent from the legislations consulted—the Italian, European Union and United States legislation. In those legal frameworks, ‘co-production’ is used either to generically indicate the private agreements among two or more co-producers or with specific reference to the audio-visual co-production (see, for instance, the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-production). 14 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/23/pdfs/ukpga_20140023_en.pdf. 15 Public 16 The

Law 99-280—Apr. 24, 1986.

law provides that these centers be federally funded through direct grants to nonprofit community-based organisations for the purpose of delivering comprehensive primary health care in deprived urban neighbourhoods and rural areas (Stivers 1990).

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assemblies as well as their representatives, who can interact with school staff ‘for the purpose of ensuring the participation to the governance of the school, giving it the nature of a community that interacts with the widest social and civil community’17 (translated from the Italian, emphasis added). These three examples show that the law can and does connect coproduction to citizenship. A legal approach to co-production, for us, also must understand what type of citizenship is engaged, though we admit that this may seem superficial or pedantic to some common law scholars or social scientists. Indeed, American and British administrative procedures seem structurally more open to the participation of civil society than their civilian counterparts (e.g. Salamon and Anheier 1994).18 Common law jurisdictions make it much easier than in civil law systems to assert that ‘a charity is recognized as a public service provider’ as in the CHC example above, even though it is a private entity (Vittadini 2005). Nevertheless, as Alexis de Tocqueville and many others after him have observed, an active concept of American citizenship emerged through individual participation in the state throughout civil society, ‘which was composed by a multitude of voluntary associations such as chapels, denominations, and towns’ (Isin and Turner 2007, 6). In civil law systems, by contrast, the category of ‘social rights’ is defined in law as an individual orientation ‘towards the state or government bodies to obtain services in the individual’s own favor’ (Mortati 1976). This formal definition has legitimised most public services in those systems (Turner 1997). By contrast, American suspicion towards state involvement in welfare and the granting of ‘new property’ rights to benefits (Reich 1964) compel an active citizenship in which American law ‘retained a stronger notion of individual responsibility for welfare and relied upon local community initiatives to address social questions’ (Isin and Turner 2007, 8). These differences in the conception of citizenship leave the question of how to legitimate co-production in nations where it is less active. It is not our aim in this chapter to provide a broad institutional comparison, but we will use the Italian case as a vehicle for addressing this question. We leave broader comparisons as an essential strand of future research.

From Social to Administrative Citizenship Our current understanding of the concept of citizenship is the result of years of interdisciplinary study involving scholars jurisprudence, sociology and politics. Citizenship is a complex concept in that it addresses not only the relationship 17 The provision states: ‘Al fine di realizzare…la partecipazione alla gestione della scuola dando ad essa il carattere di una comunità che interagisce con la più vasta comunità sociale e civica…’. 18 Salamon and Anheier (1994, 2) note that ‘the concept of the nonprofit sector at least has a coherent place in American law and usage’. By contrast, British common law constructs ‘a reasonably prominent notion of an organizational space outside the state and the market, but a far more complicated one than in the American setting’ (3).

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between the individual and the state, but also the rights and duties of those considered citizens (Romeo 2011). What is more, the idea of citizenship is not static. Emerging with the city-state, ‘it created an idea of denizen, where nation-states created a primitive notion of citizenship based upon political rights’ (Turner 1997). Later, the recognition of social rights and the formation of welfare states set the foundations of what T.H. Marshall (1950) would have considered social citizenship. His seminal work, Citizenship and Social Class, as widely criticised (Giddens 1982; Mann 1987; Turner 1997) as it is cited, still represents the starting point for the theoretical elaborations of citizenship. Marshallian citizenship is constituted by three elements. First, the civil element captures the ‘rights necessary for the individual freedom’ (Marshall 1950). Second, the political element concerns ‘the right to participate in the exercise of the political power’ (Marshall 1950). Third, the social element covers ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized human being according to the standards prevailing in the society’ (Marshall 1950). These categories of rights were certainly not recognised at the same time: only in the twentieth century could we observe a complete form of Marshallian citizenship in practice. Recent research shows that the prerequisites of social citizenship—namely, the contributions of individuals to the state in the form of work, military service and parenting—are currently on the wane (Turner 2001). Isin and Turner (2007, 10) write: ‘the institutional framework of a common experience of membership of a political community—taxation, military service, a common framework of national education, and a vibrant civil society—is declining, and this development is the real basis of the erosion of social citizenship in modern democratic states’. While offering a cosmopolitan approach to a post-social citizenship, they do recognise the importance of cities as democratic spaces wherein the citizen is brought into being. It is not our intention to criticise the solution offered by Isin and Turner (2007). However, we believe that its reliance on ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielse 2008) and the context of cities is insufficient for our purpose of legitimating co-production. To this end, we introduce a ‘new’ model of citizenship. One which is based on a renewed relationship between local public administration and citizens, and which is grounded in a set of rights and obligations that can both permit and require citizens’ active involvement in the governance and provision of public services. Our model of citizenship has theoretical roots in Italian legal doctrine, which elaborates the category of administrative citizenship: the set of fundamental relationships between the citizen and the public administration (Police 2016). These relationships consist of those rights and duties that Cassese (1998, 29) calls ‘administrative rights’, which constitute the foundation of the public administration in Italian democracy (Dario 2010). Beyond specific rights, what distinguishes administrative citizenship from a ‘traditional’ form is its relationship with a non-proximate community. Indeed,

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as clarified by Cavallo Perin (2004), above all, ‘administrative citizenship can be considered as belonging to a territorial community’ (Cavallo Perin 2004). The territorial element is so important to administrative citizenship that residence within a local community becomes a necessary condition for it to attach and to attribute rights and duties to individuals. This community aspect attaches administrative citizenship to individuals like foreign nationals who, in traditional conceptions, would be excluded. The content of administrative citizenship varies over time, depending on the extension of the recognition of administrative rights in a given country (Police 2016). For instance, Cassese (1998) notes that while the UK incorporated administrative rights as early as 1991 in the so-called ‘Citizen’s Charter’,19 Italy has been particularly slow in recognising them and in benefiting from the empowerment associated with administrative citizenship.20 In the last few years, Italy has enlarged the set of administrative rights, recognising a stronger involvement of citizens in public administration. For instance, legislation reforming administrative procedures21 approved in 1990 questioned, for the first time, the verticality of the bureaucratic paradigm, giving individuals directly or indirectly affected by administrative procedures the right to invoke an adversarial procedure to assert their interests against the public administration similar in spirit to the appeals procedures of American administrative law (see generally Bertelli and Lynn 2006, Chapter 4). More recently, legislation on transparency introduced an Italian equivalent of the American Freedom of Information Act, allowing access to the data and documents held by the public administration to anyone interested, and diffusing control over the administrative process and promoting public debate (Timo 2016). One view of these regulatory changes is that they went one step closer to openness and active involvement of citizens in the administrative process. Another is that they did not go far enough to overcome the paradigma bipolare della pubblica amministrazione, which manifests administrators and their

19 ‘Nowadays, the rights of political citizenship (association, meeting, manifestation of thought, etc.) are recognised everywhere, but differences can be seen in the recognition of the rights of administrative citizenship, which is more difficult to define. These rights, which are recognised elsewhere, seem to be neglected in Italy. With the “Citizen’s Charter”, and with the single charters of public services, including local ones, the phenomenon of citizens’ charters, in the past exclusively limited to the constitutional law and the political sphere, has extended to the administrative one and minute rights begin to be guaranteed […]. With a certain emphasis, it is stated that the citizen-user is sovereign and that his judgement on the activities of the public authorities must be heard’ (Cassese 1998, 29–30). 20 ‘For

the recognition of administrative citizenship, Italy is rather distant from the English model, and from the French one. In Great Britain, indeed, the administration’s relationship to the citizen is characterized by […] a cooperative attitude of the administration towards the citizen. In France, […] initiatives intended to make it easier to make contacts with the administration are proliferating’ (Cassese 1998, 60–61). 21 l.n.

241/1990.

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institutions on one pole and citizens on the other. More changes are necessary to legally justify citizens involvement in co-production.

Horizontal Subsidiarity One possible solution would be to leverage the horizontal subsidiarity principle introduced in the Italian constitutional reforms of 2001. Article 118 of the Constitution provides that: ‘The State, regions, metropolitan cities, provinces and municipalities shall promote the autonomous initiatives of citizens, both as individuals and as members of associations, relating to activities of general interest, on the basis of the principle of subsidiarity’. Arising from the social doctrine of the Catholic Church (Brennan 2014), the doctrine of horizontal subsidiarity became widespread in all the welfare states including Italy starting in the 1990s (Di Giovanni 2012, 24). Over time, the principle has developed multiple interpretations. On the one hand, some scholarship sees state intervention as an alternative to that of individual activity (Arena 2006, 7). Public bodies should intervene only if necessary to compensate for the inadequate efforts of civil society. On the other hand, horizontal subsidiarity as it is understood by some commentators permits the co-existence and co-operation, on an equal footing, of citizens and public managers (Massa Pinto 2003, 135–138). The latter interpretation makes administrative citizenship possible: ‘the new constitutional norm, recognizing that citizens are able to act autonomously in the general interest and providing that the institutions must support their efforts in this sense, […] recognizes that the administrations no longer have the monopoly of the protection of the public interest’ (Arena 2006, ix). This allows citizens, argues Arena (2006), to leave their passive role as public service users and to become active citizens of their communities. In this new role, the citizen thus becomes entitled to co-produce, together with the public administration, the services from which he and his proximate citizens benefit. Territory assumes a crucially important role. Local communities are not only places in which public services are (co-)produced, but are also an individual locus for administrative citizenship.

Co-production as a Duty Part of the discussion over co-production concerns the relevance of voluntary action. Indeed, scholars have wondered whether the voluntary nature of the citizen input can be considered a necessary condition for co-production. At first glance, co-production seems associated with a free choice of the individual to participate in the one or more phases of service provision. Yet it has also been argued that most public services are ‘relational goods’, and their existence would not be possible without beneficiaries’ involvement in their provision (Osborne 2010; Osborne and Strokosch 2013; van de Donk 2019). Brandsen and Honingh (2016, 432) contend nonetheless that it is possible to imagine situations in which co-production is not a free choice: ‘while coproduction is

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to a large extent a subset of volunteering…it is possible to coerce citizens to coproduce, even if doing so is counterintuitive’. We share this view. In the preceding paragraphs, we argued that the roots of co-production can be found in administrative citizenship: when they reside in a local community, individuals gain rights and duties vis á vis the public administration. Specifically, we contend that involvement in the co-production of public services can be legally articulated through a right to participate in the administrative process, but that it can also derive from legislative measures that impose a duty to pursue a public interest that is realised by participating in one or more phases of service delivery. Consider participation in solid waste recycling (Folz and Vinson 1991). By establishing a duty to respect and to protect the environment (Fracchia 2015), one can imagine a legal obligation for administrative citizens to sort their household waste so that the public administration or its contractor can more effectively and efficiently remove and recycle it, reducing both environmental pollution and the natural resources required to do so. Would it be right to claim that the compulsory activity of the administrative citizen means that they are not co-producers? We are convinced that it would not be. If the citizens in this case are not co-producers, what distinguishes such dutybased co-production from compliance with any law, such as one mandating the payment of a tax? For us, the requirement of proximity and its ability to define a relational or territorial community makes the difference. While a tax is an individual—or organisational, as in the case of a corporate tax—obligation, the proximate individual’s participation in recycling is essential to the proper functioning of the service, and for the pursuit of the public interest of the community. The individual mandate of a tax requires no proximity because the individual obligation reflexively incorporates it. Even in the case where a tax requires residency, tax compliance is similarly reflexive—if an individual has legal residency in the jurisdiction, the tax is imposed and compliance is with an individual mandate even if the individual spends most or all of her time elsewhere. For mandatory recycling, however, proximity is necessary because the co-production cannot not be done in absentia.

Conclusion In this essay, we have identified and intended to clarify the characteristics of co-production which, from a legal point of view, permit co-production. This is straightforward for direct beneficiaries and in the case of common law systems, as in the US and UK, which permit volunteer organisations to be incorporated into the public administration rather fluidly. By contrast, civilian traditions, such as Italian jurisprudence, can have a more difficult time with co-production. We have used the concept of proximity to establish a legally recognisable link for non-direct beneficiaries. We further argued that coproduction should be centred on the idea of administrative citizenship, which permits a legal formalisation of active citizenship. To exemplify our argument,

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we elaborated Italian legal doctrine as it diverges from a traditional account of citizenship. The administrative citizenship we identify permits a connection between residency within a community and a set of rights and duties towards the public administration. In this framework, the right to participate in the co-production of public services becomes a pathway to active participation administrative processes. With Brandsen and Honingh (2016), we maintain that co-production can be non-voluntary, compelled by legal provisions that, to effectuate public interests, make the participation of proximate individuals mandatory. Our analysis leaves two important and connected questions for future research to address. First, apart from proximity, scholars should consider other legally recognisable concepts that may legitimate co-production as a matter of law. Second, scholars should ask a pragmatic question: How can the law both legitimate co-production as a policy tool and permit its flexible application by policymakers at the same time? A key virtue of co-production is the intrinsic discretion it leaves in the hands of public managers and citizens in working together to achieve an objective. As in collaborative governance, the inclusion of non-state actors in the administrative process can serve to mitigate uncertainty for politicians and policy designers (Bertelli et al. 2019). Legally formalising co-production can ultimately be a double-edged sword. Schemes can gain legal status that may have benefits for participation, but this comes at the cost of limiting the creativity of policymakers in designing co-production mechanisms. For instance, suppose that co-producers could be held legally liable for externalities they create through their co-production activities. This would certainly create a chilling effect on compliance with and, ultimately, adoption of co-production schemes. Balancing the need to address truly problematic action by co-producers against disincentives for citizen participation is crucial in the development of a more comprehensive legal treatment. Although our argument relies on principles that extend beyond the borders of Italy, we have frequently referred to Italian legal doctrine and legislation. Administrative law is, by nature, the product of the history of the country in which it has emerged (e.g. Cassese 2010). For this reason, it may be complicated, if not impossible, to identify mechanisms that work across countries. Considering our argument in this light, we hope that future researchers can contribute to a debate about the legislative tools for implementing the coproduction paradigm. While this might start with a more broadly comparative examination of legal doctrine—including the involvement of supranational organisations such as the European Union—we believe that a literature should emerge that assesses tradeoffs between the legal status and practicality of a wide variety of co-production mechanisms.

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Salamon, L. M., & Anheier, H. K. (1994). Caring sector or caring society?: Discovering the nonprofit sector cross-nationally (Working Papers of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, No. 17). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. Sharp, E. B. (1980). Toward a New Understanding of Urban Services and Citizen Participation: The Coproduction Concept. Midwest Review of Public Administration, 14(2), 105–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/027507408001400203. Stivers, C. (1990). The Public Agency as Polis: Active Citizenship in the Administrative State. Administration & Society, 22(1), 86–105. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 009539979002200105. Timo, M. (2016). Cittadinanza amministrativa e democrazia partecipativa. Osservatorio Costituzionale, 3, 485–494. Turner, B. S. (1990). Outline of a Theory of Citizenship. Sociology, 24(2), 189–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038590024002002. Turner, B. S. (1993). Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship. In B. S. Turner (Ed.), Citizenship and Social Theory (pp. 1–18). London: Sage. Turner, B. S. (1997). Citizenship Studies: A General Theory. Citizenship Studies, 1(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621029708420644. Turner, B. S. (2001). The Erosion of Citizenship. The British Journal of Sociology, 52(2), 189–209. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071310120044944. van de Donk, W. (2019). Subsidiarity as an Experience and Inspiration: The Case for Regionomics in North Brabant. European View, 18(1), 45–51. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1781685819845818. van Eijk, C. J. A., & Steen, T. P. S. (2014). Why People Co-produce: Analysing Citizens’ Perceptions on Co-planning Engagement in Health Care Services. Public Management Review, 16(3), 358–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2013. 841458. Verschuere, B., Brandsen, T., & Pestoff, V. (2012). Co-production: The State of the Art in Research and the Future Agenda. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 23(4), 1083–1101. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11266-012-9307-8. Vittadini, G. (2005). Il principio di sussidiarietà tra storia e prospettiva. In P. Donati & I. Colozzi (Eds.), La Sussidiarietà. Che cos’è e come funziona. (pp. 17–36). Rome: Carocci Editore S.p.A. Whitaker, G. P. (1980). Coproduction: Citizen Participation in Service Delivery. Public Administration Review, 40(3), 240–246. https://doi.org/10.2307/975377. Williams, G. (1945). Language and the Law—I. Law Quarterly Review, 61(1), 71–86.

CHAPTER 11

Discover Together: Attempting to Alter Understanding and Practices in Governments’ Work with Citizens Robin Phinney and Jodi Sandfort

There is growing recognition that public organisations need to experience significant change to respond to the environment of the twenty-first century. While these agencies evoke impressions of stability and rigidity, scholars are increasingly calling for a ‘new public governance’ that focuses the organisational and institutional capacities of government on engaging citizens, collaborating with external partners and creating measurable public value (Ansell and Torfing 2014; Bryson et al. 2014; Emerson et al. 2012; Osborne 2010). The focus of this volume seeks to draw together some of the best thinking in that movement around the theme of co-production. Leaders in public organisations that administer human service programmes in the United States and elsewhere are echoing scholars’ call for more responsive and collaborative governance. To better serve those in need, they recognise that public organisations charged with delivering services must begin to work with those outside of government to better address the multiple and intersecting needs of individuals and families (Oftelie 2014). Thus within both scholarship and practice, there is a desire to move public organisations in the direction of greater collaboration with external actors. Of particular relevance in this shift is the manner in which governments engage with citizens in the production and delivery of public services (Osborne et al. 2012). As the various chapters in this collection emphasise, contemporary conceptions of citizen engagement view citizens as co-creating and R. Phinney (B) · J. Sandfort University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_11

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co-producing, rather than merely informing, service delivery. Much of this literature investigates the circumstances under which individuals and communities act as governance partners, and the various forms that co-production takes (Bovaird 2007; Nabatchi et al. 2017; Osborne and Strokosch 2013). However, in our review of this literature, there is limited understanding of the processes that accompany such a shift. How do public organisations move away from a focus on the citizen as a customer and towards a conception of the citizen as co-equal in developing and implementing government programmes? What factors enable and constrain this change? What tools of organisational change might be applied to increase the capacity of this rather significant shift in understanding and operational routines to take place? In this paper, we provide some initial answers to these questions. We ground our analysis in exploration of how differing governance conceptions of citizen roles become solidified in management practices. These existing practices can, in turn, constrain movement towards co-production even when senior managers may evoke principles consistent with new public governance or develop initiatives that aspire to co-production. Our analysis draws upon our experience working to support public organisational redesign in agencies providing publicly-funded human services. We begin by contrasting two differing conceptions of the role of the citizen in public governance. The first, an aspect of New Public Management, views the citizen as a consumer of public services. The second, part of New Public Governance, views the citizen as a co-producer of government programmes. We highlight differences between the two conceptions in relation to both citizens involvement in the production of services and how these ideas influence what government actors actually do. We then use case study data to illustrate the differences and analyse the factors involved in moving from one conception to another. Empirically, we focus on the implementation of an initiative developed by local government in a midwestern state in the U.S. This initiative was designed to promote citizen engagement and collaborate to alleviate poverty concentrated in one community. We show how local government staff involved in implementing the initiative struggled to shift from practices that viewed the citizen as a customer. Though staff conceptually agreed with the significance of engaging citizens as partners in developing and implementing policy, the existing organisational structures and practices made it difficult to realise this ideal. Although this study is of a failed case, our analysis also draws attention to a set of tools and resources that may help public organisations move in the direction of greater engagement and citizen responsiveness. While numerous studies investigate the institutional and organisational factors that are associated with responsive governance, only a few explore the tools and practices that might help public organisations build the capacity to do so (Hendriks 2009; Voorberg et al. 2018; Weber and Khademian 2008). Our analysis suggest that the co-creation of material artefacts, staff development

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and training opportunities and the presence of external and internal translators may help organisations negotiate a transition from old to new forms of governing. But these practices alone are insufficient to overcome the authority embedded in the existing structures and practices embedded in traditional bureaucratic organisations well practised in the new public management.

Moving to a New Public Governance Although public organisations are increasingly emphasising greater engagement and collaboration, this has not always been the dominant approach. As other chapters in this collection note, three governing paradigms have characterised public administration theory and practice over the last century (Ansell and Torfing 2014; Bryson et al. 2014; Salamon 2002; Ferlie and Ongaro 2015). Traditional public administration, which developed in the early 1900s, grew as a response to challenges such as industrialisation, urbanisation and a concern with market failure. This approach prioritised efficiency, as well the separation of politics and policy administration. A primary function of public organisations was to implement politically defined goals. New Public Management (NPM) emerged in the 1980s out of a concern that rigid bureaucratic structures and a lack of competition resulted in public services that were ineffective and costly. NPM was characterised by a belief in economic rationality and an emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness. It prioritised entrepreneurial leadership within public organizations. In practice, this approach often involved instituting market-like mechanisms in public settings, empowering public managers and integrating performance measurement to assess outcomes and progress (Hood 1995; Ferlie et al. 1996; Osborne and Gaebler 1992). More recently, scholars have begun to articulate the need for a New Public Governance (NPG) to enable more effective responses to the increasingly complexity of policy problems such as inequality and climate change and rise of challenges about the legitimacy of public institutions around the globe. This paradigm views engagement with citizens and collaborative relationships with external stakeholders as integral to public institutions in their roles of developing effective solutions to contemporary problems (Ansell and Gash 2008; Ansell 2011; Emerson et al. 2012; Torfing 2016). In addition to valuing efficiency and effectiveness, NPG prioritises democratic values such as deliberation and dialogue as integral to the work of public organisations (Ansell and Torfing 2014; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015). It also provides the opportunity to re-establish legitimacy of the public sector in the face of many global challenges. The two most recent governing paradigms (NPM and NPG) differ on many dimensions—perhaps most notably, on their conceptions of the role of individuals and communities in the governing process. Under NPM’s marketoriented approach, citizens are conceptualised as customers (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). Attending to the preferences and needs of citizens is seen as one component of a larger strategy of improving governmental performance

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through introducing competition into the design and delivery of services. Yet Thomas (2013) distinguishes several noteworthy aspects of such a conception. First, when individuals act as customers, they typically seek a product or service with a personal rather than a community value—such as a driver’s licence. Second, the responsibility of the public agency is to provide that product or service, sometimes at a cost. Under such a conception, priority is placed on streamlining and centralising the process through which citizens contact and access services, responding promptly and courteously to customer inquiries, and developing mechanisms for contacting citizens and assessing their needs and preferences. While the preferences of citizens are valued, the public manager clearly retains responsibility for producing the public service, while the citizen is the service recipient (Alford 1998). NPG’s conception of citizens as co-producers positions individuals and communities as partners in both governing and service delivery. Citizens may assume responsibility for initiating, designing and implementing products and services with both personal and community value (Voorberg et al. 2014). Viewing the citizen as a partner elevates a different set of priorities. For example, it becomes important to consider the circumstances under which citizens will participate in the co-production—particularly when the product or service does not simply satisfy a personal need (Bovaird et al. 2016). Put another way, it is not just citizens’ needs and preferences related to the product or service that are important, but also their needs and preferences related to the process of producing that product or service (Nabatchi and Amsler 2014; Osborne et al. 2012). In addition, because individuals and communities often may have different preferences than public managers, negotiating across groups with different ideas becomes critical to consider (Fung 2015). While many scholars document this conceptual turn, few studies investigate the processes of organisational changes that must occur within public organisations where leaders want to move in this direction. In this chapter, we document an attempt to move a public organisation in the direction of greater co-production with individuals and communities outside of government. In our case study, we focus specifically on the tensions that emerged within local government as it sought to work in a more collaborative way with community members. The agency had both a strict hierarchical structure consistent with traditional public management and institutionalised NPM routines focused upon efficiency and performance management. Examining the tensions that emerged as the organisation attempted to co-produce strategy and services helps to illuminate the social mechanisms at work. It also illuminates the resources necessary to build the operational organisational capacity if local governments want to move in the direction of citizen as co-creator of services and co-producer of public value (Nabatchi and Amsler 2014).

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Field Case and Research Methods Discover Together was a place-based initiative developed by one suburban Minnesota county in 2017. The initiative’s goal was to create more effective strategies for assisting people in need (technically, those living below 200% of the U.S. federal poverty line). Senior organisational leaders and county elected board members were interested in moving beyond conventional approach to health and human service provision to more ‘generative’ approaches, defined as focusing upon ‘generating healthy communities by co-creating solutions for multi-dimensional family and socioeconomic challenges and opportunities’ (Oftelie 2014). The county board selected a city with a growing and high concentration of poverty as the first location for the work and conceived of it as a Collective Impact Initiative (Kania and Kramer 2011) engaging community members to develop a common agenda for solving specific problems. A team from the Future Services Institute at the University of Minnesota was engaged to design and work with staff, building new organisational capabilities for this type of community engagement and collaborative governance. In early 2017, the facilitators and staff engaged people from various community perspectives in a Core Team to oversee the project and govern operational development. The Core Team functioned as a learning lab, where new strategies and activities could be launched with rapid adjustment. By the end of the initiative’s first year, the Discover Together Core Team consisted of six county staff members, six members of the community and three people from the Future Services Institute team. The first phase of the project involved exploring conditions within the community in more detail, identifying assets and concerns. Researchers and Core Team members investigated how the history of intergovernmental relationships influenced the potential of the initiative. In fact, this initial data collection uncovered many community assets that altered how the community was understood. Although the secondary data analysis of demographic and economic factors described a city with a ‘high concentration of poverty’, engagement revealed a very different place. Affordable housing, high quality schools, ample public space (including the parks and accessibility to the river), and the ‘small town feel’ made it appealing for young families. Commutes to the centre city were short and neighbours knew one another. There was a palpable loyalty and community pride present and many people interviewed recounted a long-standing norm that children grew up in the city and then returned to raise their own children. These ‘born and raised’ families possessed a deep loyalty to the community, investing their time and money in local churches, schools and community events. This understanding significantly reframed senior county managers understanding of the community. However, the interviews and meetings also identified growing community needs. Affordable housing meant the community was appealing to families earning low incomes and the number of children qualifying for free and

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reduced lunch in the schools was increasing. Children from such families have multiple needs and government agencies were struggling to respond. Some services were provided by the county government at a regional service centre, others provided at local nonprofit agencies or at the city government office. Limited transit options made it difficult for parents to access some of the services. And children’s needs were acutely felt in the public schools. Some saw the cause of these challenges in a more macro view; since the communities’ industrial meat packing plants shut down in the late 1970s, economic development had been a challenge. There was a lack of adequate well-paying jobs, commercial and entertainment space, and the community struggled to support small and medium sized businesses. Ethnic and racial dimensions were also at play. Community members talked openly of the contrast between ‘new families’ moving in who were more likely to be Latino and East African compared to the ‘old families’ of older, white-ethnic households. The older generations wrestled with this change more than the youth. However, national current events involving the Trump administration’s strict stance on immigration created a sense of fear within the Latino community surrounding deportation, the breakup of families and relating with the government in general. The Core Team developed a purpose statement and set of principles to direct their engagement activities, naming the initiative Discover Together to signal both the county government’s desire to co-create new relationships and the need to bring everyone’s resources together to help rebuild a sense of collectivity in the city. In the second project phase, the Core Team decided to host engagement events in natural gathering spaces, such as an annual festival, art fair, business park and citywide garage sale. Each of the more than twenty events prioritised a different topic of conversation, from general questions about the city to specific questions about education, transportation, health and wellness resources and community space. The goal was to continue to gather information about the community and generate ideas that could be developed and tested as potential solutions to community needs. By the end of the calendar year, the Core Team shifted its focus to action, while continuing to host engagement events. ‘Action teams’ were formed to address communication, supporting grassroots efforts, welcoming ethnically diverse families, local business planning, housing development and affordability and improving transportation. The scope and scale of each team’s activities varied. For example, while one team created a welcome packet and corresponding website to connect new residents to the community, another focused on convening local business owners to understand their concerns and develop responses to economic development issues. Research Methods & Analysis The analysis presented here draws upon qualitative data collected throughout the project’s first year. Future Services Institute staff, as well as Core Team

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members, used multiple methods to collect data: participant and structured observations of meetings and events; interviews and focus groups; document and secondary data analysis. We captured notes from site explorations of the city. The Core Team met over twenty times throughout the year and we documented the content of the meetings, activities and action items, and points of agreement and contention across participants. The Future Services Institute team also met monthly with county staff to discuss the initiative’s progress, which we recorded in detailed field notes. Engagement events also provided an important source of data, including photographs and structured reflection forms. We provided a summary document of each engagement event, noting participant observations, reflections and possible next steps. The second phase of the initiative also included a developmental evaluation to provide rapid-cycle feedback to Core Team members about the initiative’s progress and to shape its ongoing strategy (Patton 2010, 2016). We conducted semi-structured interviews with ten core team members and, throughout the year, created status reports to document the initiative’s progress to date. We also held focus groups with community members to inform this analysis. This interview and focus group data enhanced the 20 semi-structured interviews which were conducted with prominent community members during the initial phase. Following each Core Team meeting, the lead facilitator also created a ‘harvest document’ summarising the activities and anticipated next steps. These, as well as new products developed as solutions to the community challenges, were included in our data-base. We used NVivo to help support our systematic, inductive analysis of this rich data set. We were interested in documenting the timeline and evolution of the initiative as well as investigating points of success, tension and disagreements. In our analysis for this chapter, we present tensions that centred on differing conceptions of the role of community actors as citizens in the initiative’s implementation.

Negotiating Distinct Frameworks of Governing Conflicting approaches to public governance were evident throughout the implementation of the Discover Together initiative. Leaders’ espoused vision for the effort and its design reflected many elements of the NPG, such as an explicit conception of citizens as co-generating the initiative and co-producing solutions. However, the existing structures and management practices of the local government agency reflected NPM and traditional public administration approaches. Numerous tensions emerged as Core Team members (typically either front-line county staff or community members) and facilitators worked to reorient the governments focus and activities. Formal leaders, in spite of the elected board’s approval of the initiative, routinely defaulted to trying to steer activities more in line with existing structures that cemented governmental authority. In studies about the authentic collaboration needed in public sector co-production, several dimensions are understood to be significant

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(Purdy 2012): understanding of participant roles, experience with operational processes and the actual content of the initiative. Tensions around these dimensions were evident in this case. The original idea came to county leaders as they learned about a successful ten-year effort in another local government in California that reconceptualized its provision of health and human services as co-produced services. This idea was appealing. Yet county leaders recognised they did not have staff with the skills needed to engage diverse communities. Complying with state and federal laws had created siloed operational processes and structures, and such practices distance county staff from people turning to them for assistance. A takenfor-granted assumption in the organisation about residents was they were primarily recipients of public services. Consistent with the NPM jargon, county staff routinely referred to them as ‘customers’, reinforcing the idea that residents consume programmes. Even though they aspired to innovate like their colleagues in California, county leaders struggled to overcome the perception that citizens should be primarily served in the Discover Together initiative. They expressed trepidation about actually engaging community members as co-equal participants in governing the shape, strategy and outcomes of the engagement process. For example, while government staff who participated in Discover Together did so as paid employees of the county, community participants were not compensated. This issue became important when community leaders, particularly among those not employed by government entities such as the city or school district, wanted to participate. Residents were understandably wary of being asked to volunteer their time to an initiative that provided them with uncertain benefits for an indefinite amount of time. External facilitators raised this issue with county leaders in both internal project team meetings and in formal evaluation documentation. Yet, it was not given much attention by senior managers. Several community members declined to participate in the governing body because of this decision. In the end, the community members on the Core Team were those with either a formal role in the city or school district or retired leaders who had flexibility in their time. A second dimension of collaborative action that needs to be altered through co-production consists of operational processes. As noted earlier, local government practices reflected traditional public administration and NPM, although senior leaders initially saw the Discover Together initiative as a way to build new operational capacities. The county government staff involved eagerly participated in training activities about engagement methodologies and embraced conceptual frameworks about what to expect in complex, community initiatives. Yet the county had deeply established practices of hierarchical decision-making on even the most basic issues. Staff was used to detailed project planning and having to measure demonstrable results; senior managers evoked these practices regularly, quelling others’ excitement about operating in ways that allowed for emergent strategy in this project. For example, in addition to biweekly Core Team meetings that were supposedly governing

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the Discover Together initiative, there were weekly meetings among county staff, where they advocated for in-depth project planning and tried to anticipate what might occur. They prepared power point presentations of county measurement dashboards and social determinant of health frameworks for Core Team members. Most project decisions—even small decisions such as the provision of refreshments at a meeting—required approval from senior county managers. Future Services Institute facilitators pushed for an adaptive project structure to accommodate the emergent nature of the collaborative work. Core Team meetings emphasised co-creating the team’s purpose and core principles, and used participatory methods to cultivate fluid participant roles, and reflected an evolving project plan. The facilitation team also advocated for project activities that followed the purpose statement and core principles, rather than an external set of goals. In fact, facilitators regularly challenged the lead county staff, pointing out the disconnect between the espoused goals and operational practices, even drawing upon New Public Governance research to support their argument. However, county operational practices were so deeply engrained that formal leaders did not feel able to embrace the new practices to work in a more flexible and adaptive fashion. The final dimension important in authentic public sector collaboration (Purdy 2012) is the content of the initiative itself. Although the rising poverty rate in the city had been a primary motivation, the community’s strong sense of pride discovered in the first phase of the project didn’t align. Larger discussions about race, economic development and community change were more important and community engagement activities uncovered that the government should help invest in community assets to develop solutions for issues such as shared community space and economic development. Creating gatherings of business owners or a website to welcome new visitors to the community were important to reinforce the community’s historical character as a vibrant and welcoming place. This was the essence of what the community members wanted residents to ‘discover together.’ Yet county leaders routinely returned to the issue of poverty. Only a few months after the project’s launch, one board member repeatedly focused attention on the problem of poverty and questioned the initiative’s success in addressing that complex issue. Interviews with government leaders indicated that they struggled to track how investing in community assets could be a legitimate goal. In response, county leaders tried to use their positional authority and the role of lead convener to refocus the initiative’s discussions on combatting the increase of poverty in the community over time, rather than other issues. While they could understand the importance of community assets, they reconciled their own understanding by seeing them as ‘social determinants of health’ rather than as things with intrinsic value. Throughout the implementation of Discover Together, the competing governance frames encouraged participants to pull the initiative in opposing directions. County leaders and project managers had definite understandings

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of participant roles, operational processes and the content of the initiative—concerns that were reinforced by organisational concerns driven by efficiency, hierarchical power relationships, and an emphasis on measurement and demonstrating results. In contrast, county frontline staff, community members, and the external facilitation team promoted the idea of public value over efficiency, elevated community members as co-equals in project planning and decision-making, and reinforced a flexible and adaptive approach to project planning. Though Discover Together had several key achievements from the perspective of the community, by the end of the first year, county support began to wane. Senior county managers were disappointed. Building relationships and supporting community efforts to become more welcoming and inclusive did little to achieve the leaders’ goal of reducing poverty, at least in the short- term. As a result, the County shifted resources from actual community engagement to building internal capacity for engagement and collaboration in the next year.

Resources That Promoted Creation of Collaborative Governance Capacity While this case was not a co-produced community initiative, many lessons relevant to building knowledge about co-production can be learned from this experience. In particular, while managerial authority was formalised in practices aligned with NPM, a number of resources developed helped to decentre that authority and enable some participants to advance communitybased knowledge consistent with the NPG ambitions. Our analysis reveals that co-created material objects, training opportunities and the presence of internal and external translators were particularly important for enabling county staff to think and work differently with community members. Co-created Material Objects Material objects played an important role in bringing people together and enhancing social capital when diverse stakeholders were attempting jointly to address a public problem. During the initiative, Core Team members created an array of material objects, including large posters with compelling visuals, newsletters summarising insights of meeting attendees, graphic representations of engagement events, a five-minute video of the initiative, and formal reports. These were used strategically both in the community and in formal settings (such as the county board meeting) to facilitate awareness and understanding of the initiative’s process and goals. The importance of material objects is consistent with existing scholarship, which recognises that while engagement techniques are important (Bryson et al. 2013; Creighton 2005; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015), material objects such as physical setting, supplies such as butcher block paper and sticky notes, and visual products (such as graphic newsletters) assure effective

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engagement (Girard and Stark 2007). Material objects can influence subsequent events by drawing attention to certain insights, creating records, or inviting a deeper listening and engagement. In other words, they become significant artefacts when they are used to alter relationships and results (Latour 2005; Sandfort and Quick 2017). They literally can provide a type of ‘map’ to help orient individuals and groups about appropriate actions in the face of uncertainty (Swidler 1986; Giorgi et al. 2015; Pavitt 2006; Seidel and O’Mahony 2014). Models drawn collaboratively on large newsprint or a video developed to highlight the many voices touched by an initiative like Discover Together may bind people together sufficiently so that they collectively agree to work together. This was demonstrated repeatedly at almost every meeting of the Discover Together Core Team. When people were engaged in shaping the vision, the strategy, the tactics, with their hands clutching markers and their ideas flowing onto newsprint, they volunteered to take the next step in the work together. Artefacts represented intention, but can also shape attention. Issues that need further exploration, resolution of controversy, hopes for future development—these all were captured and shared through the material artefacts generated by the diverse group of professionals and citizens working on Discover Together. In this regard, material objects can function as a mechanism for challenging formal, institutionalised power (Boland and Tenkasi 1995; Kravcenko and Swan 2017). In sociology and organisational science, a rich literature has developed that considers the work material artefacts do in shifting power and crossing knowledge boundaries. Developing the concept of ‘boundary objects’, this research stresses both how interactions can be triggered by material artefacts and their potential role in collective learning and action (Carlile 2004; Kravcenko and Swan 2017; Seidel and O’Mahony 2014; Star and Griesemer 1989). Because boundaries are drawn to demarcate areas of specialised knowledge and to establish claims of power, material objects can help decontextualise the knowledge and enable coordination by neutralising professional identities and knowledge claims (Kravcenko and Swan 2017; Carlile 2004). Objects are one means to bring perspectives into dialogue and ‘enable conversation without enforcing commonly shared meaning’ (Boland and Tenkasi 1995: 362). As such, they are potential resources for shifting the authority of public organisations towards being more open to co-production. Training Opportunities To support the development of new practices and ideas consistent with coproduction, county staff on the Discover Together Core Team engaged in training workshops about community engagement. Right before the launch of the initiative, members were given the opportunity to develop skills in facilitation and community engagement through a three-day Art of Hosting and Harvesting workshop. Art of Hosting is a method of engaging participants

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in meaningful dialogue to motivate collective action (Lundquist et al. 2013; Holman 2010; Wheatley and Frieze 2011). It seeks to recognise and harness the complexity of social systems, facilitating engagement across a diverse set of actors in a system. As such, it provides solid building blocks for developing the generative capacity of public organisations. The training workshop provided a chance for participants to experience established engagement techniques, such as World Café (Brown and Issacs 2005) and Open Space Technology (Owen 1997), and then learning directly about how to use such techniques themselves. The workshop also taught specific methods for collecting information from individuals, which was later applied in the initiative’s pop-up engagements. County Core Team members also gained experience with rapid-cycle learning techniques such as developmental evaluation. This evaluation approach is well suited for complex implementation settings, such as collaborative governance initiatives seeking to innovate rather than simply implement a programme (Patton 2010, 2016). Rather than stress accountability to formal project plans, rapid-cycle learning techniques like developmental evaluation encourage individuals to monitor implementation effectiveness in relation to improving public value. It allows for quick shifts if an initiative gets off track. In the Discover Together initiative, the developmental evaluation was particularly useful in helping participants make sense of the collaborative work and understand its progress. The rapid-cycle data collection and analysis efforts enabled Core Team members to revisit the central purpose and guiding principles of the initiative, thereby reinforcing these components of the design. At the same time, the evaluation helped structure a process that seemed to be the antithesis of the county’s typical way of working. For example, after the first five or six months of the initiative, evaluation memos helped to flag some of the tensions described here; the themes were discussed openly at Core Team meetings. But senior county managers did not respond to them in a way to alter their own practices. When asked about this later in interviews, senior managers talked about their internal struggles; they believed the initiative was valuable for providing more information to the local government about citizen needs, but they also valued accountability for measurable outcomes in the short-term. Such outcomes were difficult to point to in the first nine months. So while training and structured learning opportunities were built into the effort, they were not powerful enough to motivate senior managers to challenge the NPM expectations of measurable outputs in the short-term. Seeing the amount of capacity needed for authentic engagement, some senior managers tried to refocus efforts in the second year on internal training. They pulled together a cross-agency work group to highlight successful engagement efforts and supported half day training sessions to build more shared knowledge and resources. The work group members held peer learning sessions, developed a strategy for sharing resources, and tried to capture the attention of executive managers. But after months of activities and still no official signal recognising the significance of the work, resignation began to set

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in. People actively questioned how all this good work would really ‘change’ the default top-down management approach in the county. They shared experiences where more bottom up energy was quashed and, ultimately, decided to abandon their efforts as a collective group. While they individually were grateful for the short-term support, the internal ‘capacity building’ training activities were not sufficient to overcome the top-down authority structure. External and Internal Translators Finally, in the Discover Together case, external and internal translators were very important in trying to implement a new way of governing. The Future Services Institute team worked continuously with county staff to help them understand the new approach and learn practical techniques to implement the approach. Shaping meeting agendas, requesting participation in engagement events, developing authentic relationships with community members by meeting them for coffee or lunch—staff were encouraged both to reconsider their established ways of carrying out the minute details of every day work and to consider the unintended consequences of conventional practices. As staff built their own understanding, they became more adept at explaining its value, the techniques and rationale to others within the county. Yet the facilitation team also had to spend considerable time helping these county staff negotiate between the two governing approaches, identifying key differences between the old and new, and helping staff build the language and arguments—including drawing upon the research basis of collaborative governance and co-production—to defend the new approach to detractors within the county. Internal translators also played critical roles in this respect, as they understood both the value of the new governing approach as well as the county’s routine practices. They regularly would discuss their internal strategy for developing buy-in, motivating other units to attend engagement events, or figuring out the most effective way to communicate to the County elected governing board. In practice, the most effective internal translators tended to be Core Team members who worked at the frontline or supervisory level. The power of the co-production activities—such as seeing citizens as expert in their own lives, or altering conventional government processes—were abundantly clear to these leaders. However, members of the Core Team who held senior management positions clearly felt more accountable to the traditional, hierarchical structure and accountability practices. The importance of internal and external translators in Discover Together is consistent with other research on collaborative governance and knowledge brokering (Cillo 2005; Dobbins et al. 2009; Gray and Ren 2014; Haragadon 2002; Kramer and Wells 2005; Michaels 2009; Phipps et al. 2017). External brokers provide crucial links between new research and ideas and the organisation, identifying the problem needing to be solved, developing goals and cultural values that support change, and holding

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people accountable for changing their practice. They understand the organisational and larger policy context. Internal brokers play similar roles but often possess deeper knowledge of existing communities of practice and nuances of local knowledge. Both facilitate the flow of information. By understanding multiple schemas, or frameworks for understanding and interpreting new stimuli, they can help resolve ambiguity and move a group forward.

Implications and Conclusion This chapter provides an in-depth look at a case in which local government espoused the goal of co-production of human services and desired to move towards a more engaged and collaborative form of governance. Our analysis here stitches together field experiences and a rich body of work on collaborative governance and innovation. In the end, Discover Together illustrates specific points of tension that a public organisation must navigate if it is interested in making this dramatic change. It is an failed case of collaborative governance but one which we believe holds important lessons. Paying attention to how boundary objects are developed and deployed in co-production may be fruitful to move public organisations towards implementing new public governance. Additionally, the importance of training and sharing a common language is recognised as an important part of supporting public sector innovation (Bailey 2012). And working with external and internal translators can provide important resources to support the institutional change. For example, a study of public health decision makers in Canada (Dobbins et al. 2004) found that use of co-created material artefacts, advocating for reinforcement of new ideas through training or performance assessment, and managers who could act as role models for the new change, were particularly useful. Interesting, although these strategies were all deployed in the Discover Together cases, the application of these resources did not build adequate momentum for change. As others have noted (Purdy 2012), collaborative action changes conventional roles, operational processes and the overall initiatives undertaken by government. The Discover Together effort ambitiously embarked upon such a change. Although some Core Team members and external facilitators worked tirelessly at highlighting community priorities and tried strategically to introduce new management practices and to use artefacts and training to translate between internal and external worldviews, it was ultimately not sufficient to destabilise the top-down hierarchical structure or deeply rooted understanding of the ‘citizen as consumer’ reflected in the agency’s management practices. Senior managers were engaged in other initiatives and did not really commit to the type of changes espoused when they launched the co-production initiative. They had their frameworks—such as the social determinants of health—and that was not going to be challenged by community members’ articulation of the assets found in the community that could be applied to addressing poverty.

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And, given the hierarchical authority structure in the organisation, without its commitment and willingness to change its own roles or understanding of the overall initiative, authentic collaboration could not be sustained. Although the initiative provided tools and resources to support county staff as they negotiated between old and new approaches to governing, they were not able to activate sufficient authority to challenge those at the top about the importance of this new way of working with citizens. Global conditions bring new urgency to the aim of making government more responsive to and aligned with the needs of citizens (Ansell 2011). While the goals of the NPG are laudable, this case study helps to remind us that the road ahead might not be a straight one. Yet this analysis suggests that scholars can help draw attention to the operational implications of the new NPG vision by focusing on a number of important questions: How exactly do public organisations move from a governing approach characterised by an emphasis on market mechanisms and citizens as customers to one prioritising collaboration and co-production? What capacities do public organisations need to develop, and how do those capacities differ from what was institutionalised in the last eighty years? What resources effectively challenge the conventional authority of hierarchies or performance management to bring about productive changes that enable citizens to be involved in authentic co-production? Serious investigation of these questions can help assure that public organisations step more directly into their roles supporting the creation of public value. Given the urgent need to be more effective at collectively responding to our most pressing social problems, researchers should be poised to assist in this process. Acknowledgements The project discussed here is greatly influenced by our colleagues at the Future Services Institute, an applied research and engagement centre focused on supporting redesign of health and human services. We want to acknowledge the work of Innovation Manager Jen Mein, Research Assistants Rachel Kutcher and Omar Leal, and our community partners in Minnesota. The work of Luke Van Horn and Deb Griffith was particularly significant in trying to help government learn more about the practice of authentic community engagement. We are grateful for their partnership.

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CHAPTER 12

Co-production from a Third-Sector Perspective Beth Gazley

Introduction The ‘third sector’ goes by many names—‘the nonprofit sector’, ‘l’économie sociale’, ‘civil society’, the ‘voluntary sector’, ‘the commons’, ‘the in-between space’. It has also been subject to many attempts at characterisation (for more, see Etzioni 1973; Lohmann 1992). According to Salamon and Anheier’s (1992) frequently applied definition, the third sector includes self-governing organisations that are neither governmental nor businesses (i.e. the ‘first’ and ‘second’ sectors), and that hold in common voluntary origins and a valuesdriven rather than profit-making motivation. In many descriptions of global economic life, scholars argue that the third sector is actually a ‘fourth’ sector, since it has emerged out of needs formerly provided for by an alternative ‘third’ sector of families, households and informal communities (Alessandrini 2002; Brandsen et al. 2005). Even as recently as this decade, scholars continue to observe how relatively under-theorised the third sector is, in comparison to the governmental and business sectors (Corry 2010). Such an idea sits easily in this chapter on coproduction because, as it turns out, co-production is not a concept familiar to many third-sector scholars. Why this mutual lack of familiarity? And where are the points of connection?

B. Gazley (B) Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_12

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This chapter addresses these questions first by introducing the reader to the major theoretical frameworks that have been used to explain third-sector activity, particularly (in keeping with the purposes of this Handbook) the activity occurring nearest to governmental service provision. These are Salamon’s ‘three failures theory’, Young’s ‘three lenses’ and the closely related ‘interdependence theory’. Next, three barriers built into co-production’s historical origins are introduced, which I argue have generally limited its use across the disciplines, including its applicability to third sector studies. This chapter then offers some points of connection between co-production and voluntary sector activity, focusing on opportunities for a broader and more inclusive framework to realise co-production’s original need to be ‘useful’ (Brudney and England 1983, 61). One way to be useful is to become an antidote or solution to the incompleteness of some theories of governmentnonprofit relations. Yet, this chapter also concludes with some ways in which co-production’s integration with voluntary sector activity may actually weaken its ability to serve public values. This chapter focuses much of its attention to US and Western contexts, since these are the contexts in which co-production theory and many aspects of voluntary sector theory have developed, but makes efforts to frame the lessons and opportunities of co-production as a voluntary sector activity in larger, cross-national contexts.

Theories of the Third Sector I begin by acknowledging a key factor in the weakness of nonprofit theory: the relative youth of modern nonprofit studies (less than 50 or so years old, so not much older than co-production theory itself). This fact leads Knutsen and Brock (2014, 1115–1117) to suggest the voluntary sector has not yet reached the status of a ‘normal science’ with broadly accepted ‘principal logics’ or ‘paradigms’. The lack of a conceptual consensus could also make the connecting points with other theories harder to find. However, while incomplete, the ideas generated by third-sector theorists are rich, varied and offer an excellent framework for understanding co-productive activity vis-à-vis the third sector. Three-Failures Theory The third sector’s modern theoretical origins are mainly politico-economic and sociological. The first of these perspectives begins by observing that all economies—i.e. where people obtain goods and services necessary to life— have natural and inevitable ‘inefficiencies’, failures to provide what all people ask for in the expected quality or quantity (Steinberg 2006). These are known as ‘three failures theory’. First, commercial markets ‘fail’ when consumers who have the means to purchase services don’t trust their quality so don’t purchase the service. Consumers may lack trustworthy information or the purchaser

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of a service may not be the consumer of a service (for example, someone who supports a programme financially). Under such circumstances, ‘information asymmetries’ may occur or it may become more difficult to ‘police’ the producer of a service, particularly in the absence of ordinary ‘policing’ tools such as a contract. Hansmann (1980, 845) argues that these instances of ‘contract failure’ produce ‘the essential factor in the role of nonprofit enterprise’ because nonprofits may offer the more trustworthy choice, absent the profit-making and corrupting motive of the commercial enterprise. The trust derives from the fact that public laws governing nonprofits (social organisations, civil society organisations, associations, charities, public benefit organisations, etc.) in some parts of the globe may constrain their profit-making motives and opportunities. Such an organisation may possibly have less reason to take advantage of the consumer. Thus, we see nonprofits actively competing with commercial enterprises in many areas ripe for ‘contract failure’, providing arts and cultural programming, education, daycare, health care, job training and a host of goods and services. The other option in cases of market failure is for governments to provide the services. For those services that cannot be provided efficiently by the commercial market (because they are public or quasi-public goods, nonrivalrous and non-excludable) a government may consider provision of the good or service to be in the public interest, such as clean air, national defense, public health or a carbon-neutral energy sector. Authoritarian regimes may provide the service for public interest reasons alone, but in representative democracies, voters may also demand the service through the ballot box. Even for goods and services that do have commercial viability (they are rivalrous or excludable) a government may still decide there is public value in providing the service. An example is education, which can be commercialised but where governments of all kinds deem an educated citizenry to be essential to stability, growth and other national goals, and therefore underwrite the cost of public education through taxation. Commercial markets also ‘fail’ when consumers do not have the means to purchase goods and services necessary to their quality of life. When the detrimental effects of such a situation are considered important enough to merit a response, either the governmental or third sector, or both, may contribute. An example is food, which is available for commercial sale in nearly every corner of the inhabited world but which is certainly not affordable by all. Many governments, therefore, have social welfare policies that include food assistance. However, of course, governments may also fail, through weak policies or budget limits, to provide what people need in the way of basic assistance, so in many parts of the world, including highly developed countries, the ‘third sector’ steps into provide food and other basic needs. Furthermore, in many parts of the world some citizens reject the government option in favour of something they desire but which the average voter may not want, such as a religious education. Under the theory of the ‘median

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voter preference’ (Downs 1957) it is unlikely that the electorate will allow their taxes to be spent on the specialised religious education of others. This is one example of ‘government failure’, a term coined by Weisbrod (1975) to describe what happens in even broadly distributive and generous socialist economies when citizen demand exceeds the government’s ability to provide a service but which can also be used to cover cases where government intervention fails for similar reasons to market provision (e.g. lack of information, externalities, discrimination). Complicating a government’s desire to meet citizen demand is that among those demanding more, consumer preferences also naturally vary (known as ‘demand heterogeneity’). For religious education, then, a consumer from a country with widely varying (heterogeneous) educational preferences might seek the specific religious instruction of their choice. And some of those parochial schools, madrasas or chabads might be not-for-profit. In Weisbrod’s early characterisation of market and government failures, the third sector provides the means of adjusting consumer demand by supplementing government services and offering an alternative to market goods. In the case above, the third sector can provide the specific religious options which consumers desire. However, lest the ‘third sector’ sector be considered the optimal alternative option for consumers in need of goods and services they cannot obtain from the other sectors, a set of theories also explains how nonprofits also sometimes fail to deliver what consumers want due to natural economic inefficiencies. ‘Voluntary failure’ theories as developed by Salamon (1987) describe four ways in which nonprofits can fail to satisfy consumer demand. The first two are ‘philanthropic insufficiency’ and ‘philanthropic amateurism’, describing those cases when either donor supply or the quality of services does not match demand, due to free ridership or other supply/demand problems. The inability to meet demand may be geographic or economic, but it is inherent (Weisbrod 1975). As Salamon (1987, 40) explains, ‘the voluntary system, despite its advantages,…has serious drawbacks as a …reliable stream of resources to respond adequately to community needs’. Two additional possible barriers are ‘philanthropic particularism’ and ‘philanthropic paternalism’. The first of these describes the ability of any private-sector provider of services, including a charity, to choose its own clients, nature or location of services. This ability is considered to be ‘one of the purported strengths of the voluntary sector’ (Salamon 1987, 40), given its function to serve niche demands, as noted above. However, such nonprofit behaviour can also lead to gaps in, or inefficient duplication of services (Steinberg 2006), unless these niche providers have incentives to collaborate to smooth out service gaps across organisational boundaries such as through inter-organisational collaboration.

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‘Philanthropic paternalism’ refers to the fact that many third-sector activities are shaped by the preferences of wealthy donors (Salamon 1987). Even with services to those in greatest need, the nonprofit provider may define community problems and responses in ways that don’t make sense to recipients of those services. An excellent example can be found in the evolution of cash assistance distributed by disaster response agencies. Cash assistance is efficient but is it effective? Paternalism manifests itself here in the historic notion that Red Cross/Red Crescent societies should only provide material aid like food and shelter, despite the obvious preference by victims of disaster for cash to purchase what they need quickly and on their own. In modern times, debit cards and other forms of cash aid to disaster victims are more frequent, but they also remain controversial because of the same paternalistic concerns (e.g. the concern that recipients will spend the cash unwisely). Three Lens Theory, Interdependence Theory and Other Supply-Side Theories Three-failures theory, and many other aspects of the third-sector’s conceptualisation, has been criticised for perpetuating a commonly recognised weakness of third-sector theory: it tends to describe the third sector more in terms of what it isn’t than what it is. This ‘residual’ approach is seen even in the most commonly used global terms for third-sector organisations, as nonprofit and non-governmental. Three-failures theory can also be criticised as not generalisable since it was framed in the context of a politically pluralistic welfare state and may not be universal enough for broad geographic application to nonfree market economies. Another critique of three-failures theory, to which this chapter now turns, is that it addresses mainly the demand-side, or the gaps in consumer demand that one market or another may fill. Better supplyside theories may help to explain when and where third-sector activity can be expected. For example, Salamon and Anheier (1992, 222) suggested that service ‘entrepreneurs’ step forward to found ‘non-profit institutions in fields where neither the market nor the state is providing needed services or support’ (of course, willing donors must agree to privately finance the service). Dennis Young (2000, 150) built out the circumstances under which nonprofits may help to produce public services, describing three possible ‘lenses’ on nonprofit-government service delivery relations. The ‘supplementary lens’ describes situations of government failure, in which nonprofits step into meet a demand for services that government will not or cannot satisfy. The ‘complementary lens’ describes instances where nonprofits help to carry out the work of government, which is still financed by the government. Finally, an adversarial relationship is also possible, where nonprofits work in ways oppositional to government policy. Gazley and Cheng (2019, 5) have observed that the three-lens theory works well as a global theoretical framework of government–nonprofit relations in that it offers ‘circumstantial and geographic flexibility: the activities may happen simultaneously, and they may change

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as economic circumstances and public policy cause inter-sectoral behavior to evolve. They are interested in funding flows, but not exclusively’. A final possible explanation for nonprofit behaviour vis-à-vis the public sector is framed as ‘interdependence theory’ (Salamon and Anheier 1998). This theory is closely related to Young’s ‘complementary’ lens. It has garnered some empirical support for its central argument that the intersectoral relationship is mutually dependent, wherein nonprofits bring expertise and political support to government programmes while governments bring resources. When both sectors consider a service to be essential, they support it jointly, in complementary rather than substitutable (or zero-sum) ways. In doing so, the partnerships may compensate for some of the limitations on service effectiveness described in three-failures theory. In short, joint action is expected to compensate for inherent weaknesses in either sector. There are limits to interdependence theory’s generalisability as well. It has a narrow focus on those services in which governments and nonprofits have a mutual interest, and it has been used almost exclusively to describe relationships in which government acts as principal (as planner or financier), and nonprofit as agent (as the mechanism for service delivery). The theory has not been as useful in addressing the enormous growth in charities created to raise private support for government services, through earned income or philanthropy, or in other instances when the voluntary sector becomes partner rather than agent in public service delivery. Critiques of Third-Sector Theory as ‘Incomplete’ Despite the richness of these various theoretical efforts, third-sector theories continue to be criticised for an approach that defines the sector more for what it isn’t than for what it is (Knutsen and Brock 2014; Lohmann 1992). Some scholars suggest there is something inherently incomplete about efforts to systematically explain third-sector activity (Brandsen et al. 2005). A number of metaphors are in common play to explain the reasons. One mostly economic and political narrative describes third-sector theory as ‘fuzzy’ due to the ‘blurred’ or ‘gray’ edges of the sector, inhabiting an ‘in-between space’ between state, market and community/family (see, for example, Knutsen and Brock 2014). This idea emerges from an understanding that people around the globe consume both public and private goods, but they do so in markets where various demand- and supply-side considerations mean production almost never relies on one sector alone. In a sense, all four sectors produce our goods. Another, sociological, perspective observes that sectoral boundaries do not ‘blur’ so much as they are ‘nested’, since individual life always depends on some level of public and private organisational activity to secure resources (Van Til 2000). Knutsen and Brock (2014, 1119) make a particular point important to coproduction: they criticise efforts to define the world’s various nonprofit sectors based on ownership, ‘without considering influences from other sectors’. They

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argue that an ‘ownership’ approach erroneously categorises the voluntary sector as a self-contained, ‘closed system’. Instead, the voluntary sector interacts with and adapts to its external environment, and resources, decisions, stakeholders, may come from multiple sectors. The epistemological solution, they argue, is to approach the study of the millions of entities within the global voluntary sector as the study of a ‘continuum’ (p. 1121) of defining characteristics, including processes and outcomes and specific conditions such as funding source and mission. An additional critique of nonprofit theories is that they are weakest in their ability to explain cases in which two or possibly three markets all succeed or fail together. Government privatisation efforts, for example, often suppose (erroneously) that nonprofits or markets can pick up service delivery on their own. But this ‘either/or’ framework is unrealistic in that effective public service provision may involve both a service producer and active user involvement. Co-production may be a more useful framework in emphasising the complementarity and mutuality of the citizen role in public service provision. A brief foray into co-production’s origins will help explain this possible connection.

Co-production’s Origins and Definition Co-production theory appeared in the mid-twentieth century as a way of describing ‘jointly produced output’ between the producer of a service and the person being served (Garn et al. 1976, 15) or as ‘the process through which inputs used to produce a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not “in” the same organization’ and are therefore not the ‘regular’ producer of the service (Ostrom 1996, 1073). In the context of public services, co-production was considered a useful antidote to some prevalent ‘myths’ about the way in which public services are delivered (Ostrom 1996, 1079). For example, co-production recognised that government was not the single producer of public services, since in fact (as the section above describes), citizens, nonprofits and commercial enterprises also jointly helped the public sector to produce collective goods, the quality of which might improve in the process. Co-production’s Origins Outside of Voluntary Sector Theory: Three Barriers As noted, co-production is not very visible in voluntary sector theory. The first barrier to broader usage may lie in the fact that while the ‘voluntary sector’ is global, the term ‘co-production’ emerged from a particular point in one Western country’s history. The 1970s–1980s ushered in a period of economic stagnation and broad disillusionment about the US government’s role abroad and domestically. This loss of faith in government was exploited by one American political party, ushering in a President who argued in his inaugural address that

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“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule…. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden.” (Ronald Reagan, January 20, 1981, emphasis added)

Within this context and the new fiscal realities imposed by ‘Reaganomics’, an idea emerged of a public services system that might view citizen engagement in public service delivery perhaps less as Reagan’s ‘burden’ than as an opportunity. Co-production might be viewed as an ‘antidote’ to public disengagement—as a way to reactivate the citizenry in publicly beneficial ways (Brudney 2019, 4). In fact, citizens as consumers of public goods might play an essential role in service creation (Parks et al. 1981, 1002). A second barrier to co-production’s ability to flourish was changing political winds. Brudney (2019) suggests that the development in the immediate post-Reagan/Bush years of a new public service delivery philosophy entitled ‘New Public Management’ (NPM), slowed co-production’s adoption into the scholarly doctrine of public administration schools. NPM’s emphasis on efficiency and professionalism viewed citizens as consumers of services, not as active co-producers. If there were a role for citizens in service delivery, its scholarly examination was assigned to the emerging field of volunteerism and volunteer management theory (Brudney 2019). Meanwhile, during this same time period, many parts of the global nonprofit sector were undergoing a similarly seismic evolution. When Ronald Reagan targeted government, he intended the voluntary sector to pick up the slack. His presidential successor, George H.W. Bush, took a similar tack, as did Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. As a result, charities became much more self-sufficient. Co-production re-emerged in the scholarly discourse under a new reality, the inability of either nonprofits or NPM to address the most intransigent social problems through marketised and managerial approaches (Alford 2014; Bovaird 2007). Levine and Fisher (1984) may have even anticipated NPM’s inability to satisfy public needs for citizen engagement when they wrote as early as 1984 that ‘sealing off …the technical core of public agencies merely provides more ammunition for critics’ of an unresponsive government (p. 179). They noted, for example, the ‘paradox’ (p. 178) of finding that citizens rated public agencies highest when they had directly engaged with them. They were equally prophetic on the details, observing for example, how the need to professionalise police services might seem like an obvious public goal but might end up fostering a dangerous level of public ‘alienation’ from this essential government function. Yet, even while welfare states in the 1980s and 1990s came to terms with the limits of NPM, the new solutions they developed and the ensuing scholarly efforts to measure progress occurred in isolation from the study

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of ‘co-production’, while generating a separate and extensive scholarship on ‘participatory budgeting’, ‘participatory democracy’, ‘collaborative public management’, ‘value co-creation’, ‘collective impact’, ‘asset-based community development’, ‘networked service delivery’ and so on. This liberality in the nomenclature has caused some closely related ideas to spin off into their own spheres, a result that is unhelpful to theory development. An example is the development of a field of participatory governance, defined as ‘the active involvement of citizens in government decision making’ (Bingham 2009, 274). This rich field deserves to be linked more closely to the study of co-production. Still, co-production never lost its allure as an arguably ‘essential’ activity (Parks et al. 1981, 1002). As Alford (2009, xiv) points out, quite reasonably, unless clients ‘contribute time, effort, information, and compliance’, public organisations will fail to achieve their service mandate. This new phase of co-production’s theory development is more empirically focused. And with the assumption of ‘inseparability’ of citizens from public service provision (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013, 20), it is also more conceptually interested in the distinct ways in which citizens individually or collectively participate in co-producing public services ‘across the full value chain’ (Bovaird 2007, 847), through for example co-planning, co-design, co-managing, co-commissioning, co-construction and co-governance (see for example Brandsen and Pestoff 2006; Jetté and Vaillancourt 2011). With the resurgence of interest comes a call for ‘a new public service ethos or compact in which the central role of professionals is to support, encourage, and coordinate the co-production capabilities of service users and the communities in which they live’ (Bovaird 2007, 857). The third and final possible reason for co-production’s limited treatment may rest in the sometimes narrow silos of academic work. Ostrom (1996, 1073) described these as ‘disciplinary walls’ that trapped co-production in too narrow a scope of usefulness. Today, however, a robust conversation about co-production continues in public management circles in which thirdsector interests are increasingly well-represented (see for example, Pestoff et al. 2012). Some scholars representing other influential nonprofit sector disciplines such as political and organisational sociology have discovered and found uses for co-production theory, suggesting the theory is spreading across multiple disciplines. Co-production Theory’s Potential Application to Third-Sector Theory The nonprofit sector’s innately ‘hybrid’ or ‘porous’ nature has challenged theorists, but it also offers many opportunities for the third sector to engage in co-production. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, while co-production theory has been employed robustly, it has been applied somewhat separately from these voluntary sector theories and outside the mainstream nonprofit scholarship. An example of this gap is seen in highly influential text by Powell and Steinberg

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(2006), The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook (2nd Ed.), which offers only a single passing reference to Ostromian theory and does not mention ‘co-production’ at all. The same absence is seen in other widely cited books addressing cross-sector voluntary action. Of course, co-production addresses only some voluntary sector activity, that part which supports publicly desired outcomes. Large areas of the social sector by design and preference have no interest in governmental engagement and operate in private, associational or quasi-legal spheres. But there are still vast areas of nonprofit activity intertwined with governmental activity. Indeed, a portion of US tax law (based on British Elizabethan law) was written for this possibility, permitting charitable activity under circumstances that include ‘lessening the burdens of government’ (Treasury Regulation §1.501(c)(3)–1(d)(2)). Young’s theory offers one means of bringing co-production theory into the fold of mainstream, global nonprofit theories. In writing about coproduction, Meijer (2011, 600) described its ‘substitution value’ and its ‘supplementary value’. This idea seems closely related to Young’s framework, in which the voluntary sector is expected to bring new resources to public service delivery (the supplementary role), or where citizens and nonprofits, as consumers or representatives of consumers, engage in partnership relationships with government in the process of co-producing public services (the complementary and communal role). Individuals and groups engaged in co-productive behaviour with government may still reserve their right to influence or challenge government behaviour (Young’s ‘adversarial’ lens). In fact, all three aspects of government–nonprofit sector relations suggested by Young may take place in co-production simultaneously (i.e. as co-provision, co-governance, co-planning, co-management, etc.). Yet, co-production may still only partly overlap with Young’s ‘supplementary’ category, since when citizens or organisations wholly substitute for government provision of public services, co-production is replaced by a purely self-organising activity. Institutionalised Co-production as a Third-Sector Activity Another factor working against co-production’s wider application to third sector activity has been its early emphasis on citizen action without much interest in the transition to how collective citizen action translates to organised nonprofit behaviour. However, the original scholars did note the possibility that citizen-consumer action might be formalised. For example, Kiser and Percy (1980, 20), wrote of ‘coordinated arrangements’ for joint governmentcitizen action. Brudney and England (1983, 62) not only wrote about the possible ‘institutionalization of citizen support’ (p. 60)—they also considered ‘the collective forms of co-production more important, simply because they are likely to have greater impact on who receives the benefits’ (p. 62). One way in which co-production scholarship has attempted to grapple with nonprofits as actors in co-productive activities is with nomenclature. Over

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time, the ‘multi-faceted’ dimensions of co-production described by Brudney and England (1983, 61) have been built out into a typology of co-production as co-management, co-construction, etc., (Brandsen and Pestoff 2006) or as ‘institutionalized co-production’ (Joshi and Moore 2004). The role that nonprofits take is somewhat uncertain. Bovaird (2007) has suggested that in partnered service delivery arrangements, nonprofits become the principal rather than the agent in the co-productive activity. They involve service consumers but they serve as the ‘professionalised service provider’ (which could come from any sector). Thus a central premise of co-production theory is maintained: the user of the service (client, patron, member) must also participate, voluntarily, in the service delivery. However, the lines of demarcation between individual and collective action quickly blur, since an individual may actively create an institution to serve legitimacy, legal or fundraising purposes, or a nonprofit may actively invite consumers as volunteers to coproduce public services, and perhaps to design them, as well. Co-productive activities in such situations span individual, group and collective action. Institutionalised co-production may therefore be viewed as an evolving continuum that may begin with less formalised activities but evolve through its own success into either governmental or citizen efforts to institutionalise the activity. In such circumstances, theoretically, co-production may be suited for a multidimensional definition, based on the extent to which citizens are involved, or their roles, or their proximity to the core services of the government agency they are supporting (Brandsen and Honingh 2016). But while there are existing efforts at describing co-production in such multidimensional and hybrid terms, few efforts address the dimension of time, viewing citizen participation in evolutionary terms or as it might change over time from informal to institutionalised co-production. Joshi and Moore (2004, 32– 33) have applied this argument about co-production’s structural and temporal flexibility to make a distinct point about institutionalised co-production, suggesting that it is a useful concept to explain citizen participation in public service delivery in non-Western, developing countries ‘where state authority is weak and public agencies struggle hard to fulfil the kinds of roles that we take for granted in OECD countries’. In these instances, it is the relative strength of the third sector and the ‘permeability of the public-private divide’ that may encourage third sector organisational arrangements for service delivery to emerge over time. Another of these dimensions of hybridity should include the question of origins. Institutionalised co-production rests in the opportunity for either citizens or government, or sometimes both, to found and originate thirdsector activity that co-produces public services. Nonprofit theory rests on a general assumption that its roots, origins, energy and resources rest in collective private-sector, citizen action. But the public sector is fully capable of creating nonprofit entities itself, and does so in many countries most energetically. Indeed, Brudney and England (1983) suggested that public officials could more likely take the initiative to institutionalise citizen co-productive

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activities so they reap the benefits permanently. This strategy should seem normal when viewed through Salamon’s (1987) lens of the entrepreneur as the ‘supply-side’ creator of third sector activity. The only difference is that the government is the entrepreneur. When viewed as more fluid and multidimensional phenomena, Gazley and Cheng (2019, 8–9) have suggested that co-production may also be useful in explaining collective behaviour and consumer activity in contexts in which nonprofit–governmental relations are still evolving. They note that coproduction is a systems-oriented theory with great temporal flexibility, and a theory that is highly adaptable to context: co-production is interested in citizen behavior across the sectors without much concern about their legal boundaries or status. Co-production fits very well into explanations of optimal social sector behavior, since it emphasizes the fact that quality public service provision simply cannot take place without the joint efforts of citizens and government. For example, quality public education is a result of … good education policy, good teachers, good students, and good parenting. An effort to focus on just one aspect will likely fail. This is the essence of co-production. Its roots rest in the idea of a systems-oriented, multi-party governance approach ‘beyond markets and states’ (also described as ‘polycentric’) as both the more efficient and effective choice wherein citizens and government are involved simultaneously in making service decisions (Ostrom 2010, 641). It is therefore a more comprehensive perspective than some other theories, especially those focused narrowly on resource flow.

Co-production’s Engagement with the Third Sector: To What End? Despite its ability to organise collective citizen action, both the advantages and disadvantages of co-production were foreseen by its early theorists. Unfortunately, the extant scholarship tends to emphasise the successful rather than problematic cases (for exceptions, see Bovaird and Loeffler 2012, and Williams et al. 2016). This situation may be due to both normative, ‘coproduction-is-good’ perspectives and also a survivorship bias in the empirical observations of co-production. Here again, third sector theories may be useful to co-production research, in anticipating some of co-production’s greater challenges. This section addresses those possible problems arising from specifically collective or institutionalised co-productive activity. On the positive side, nonprofits engaged in co-production may be seen as a more trustworthy partner to government, while organising citizen coproductive activity under the roof of a formal, nonprofit organisation may serve to professionalise and therefore improve the quality of a service. However, in some countries, putting public service delivery in the hands of a nonprofit ‘partner’ removes that service from many forms of legalised public scrutiny, such as sunshine laws and open meeting laws (i.e. citizen access to public records or meetings). Most nonprofit director meetings are closed to

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the public. In such instances, institutionalised co-production that occurs by ‘privatising’ not only the service, but also the ways in which citizens engage in the service, is counterproductive to and unsupportive of the originators’ ideals of a service delivery mechanism that brings citizens closer to government and allows citizens more say over service delivery decisions. Joshi’s and Moore’s (2004) concept of ‘institutionalised co-production’ could be viewed as almost a self-contradictory term, unless in the process of institutionalising the service, mechanisms are put in place to ensure clients are included in deliberative processes (again, see Bingham 2009). An example of how such a conflict between public and private values can occur in the scope of a co-produced activity is offered in the history of the American National Red Cross. The American arm of this organisation was created as a federal instrumentality by an Act of Congress, which accepted that large-scale emergency assistance was the government’s responsibility, but also recognised that citizen volunteers (more than 300,000 of them) play an essential role in localised disaster responses. Despite its public origins, the government presently provides very little funding to the organisation. Making a long story very short, the Red Cross has not always performed to the public’s or government’s expectations. In a 2015 report commissioned by members of Congress, the Government Accountability Office (US GAO 2015) recommended greater governmental oversight in the form of independent evaluations. But the Red Cross rejected the request to open itself up to greater public scrutiny, citing its private, nonprofit status. A co-produced activity can therefore legally become closed to public scrutiny once it is provided via a non-governmental organisation. The impact of such activity on citizen perception of the service’s effectiveness or credibility has not been widely addressed in co-production literature. Another potential problem with institutionalised co-production can occur at the government end. Governments with the opportunity for an institutional partnership may decide to co-opt the partner for new goals, even in cases where the original intent was to offer the partnering institution some autonomy (say, to provide an advocate’s voice for the consumer of the service). An example is seen in the American history of parent–teacher organisations. In the 1960s, an Act of the US Congress sought to improve public education by requiring public schools to provide a vehicle for parental involvement in local schools (Cahn and Gray 2012). But in this case, the benign aspects of co-production, as imagined through the active involvement of parents in their childrens’ education, has been increasingly twisted, evolving into something else entirely. Today, parent–teacher organisations serve mainly as fundraising vehicles for public schools, and much less so as advocates or sources of classroom volunteers. PTOs are still co-producing, but the replacement of the original ‘co-governance’ or ‘co-management’ role with a ‘co-provisioning’ or ‘co-financing’ role serves governmental interests more than that of parents, not only in securing new resources but also in neutralising a potentially adversarial partner by redirecting its energy to fundraising. A further outcome

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of these situations is that governments may view the active fundraising as a sign that they can withdraw from the service even further (Schatteman and Bingle 2015). This is a form of government failure that was not originally predicted by the originators of three-failures theory. Another potential, problematic outcome of third sector or institutionalised co-production is when it begins to reflect the values of the institution in ways that undermine public or social values. An example of a widely accepted ‘public value’ is fair and equitable distribution of services—this is an expected element in governmental services. However, as noted earlier under ‘philanthropic paternalism’ and ‘philanthropic particularism’, citizens co-producing a public service may decide they want to co-produce only the services from which they benefit directly. For example, a parent may only raise funds for the school (or even the class) their own child attends, and resist equitable distribution of the fruits of their own labour. Although organising such co-producing activity under the auspices of a nonprofit institution might be viewed as a way to bring public values back to the service, including equalising service distribution, the nonprofit has no legal responsibility to do so, and there is plentiful evidence of voluntary failure to provide an equal service (see for example the research on public education by Nelson and Gazley 2014; Paarlberg and Gen 2009; Suslova 2018). A final example of institutionalised co-production’s possible failure to deliver is seen in ‘philanthropic amateurism’ or a weakly professionalised service and one of less reliable quality. The Bloomington School wrote in the early days about the benefits of citizen involvement in police services. However, in a notorious American case of co-production’s possible consequences, an armed white neighbourhood watch volunteer named George Zimmerman fatally shot a young Black man named Trayvon Martin in 2012. Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder, not on the basis of whether or not he did his job as a representative of the community in its relationships with the police (in fact, he did not, since he had been directed by emergency services to ‘stand down’), but rather on Florida state law, which treated him as a private individual acting in self-defence. The incident, widely viewed as a case of racial profiling, has become a touchstone in contemporary discussions of co-production of police services, by those who recognise that citizen volunteers as co-producers may do more harm than good without effective governmental controls (Brewer and Grabosky 2014; Williams et al. 2016). Are they held accountable as citizens or as agents of government? These cases reflect ‘the dark side’ of co-production, situations in which public values have been ‘contaminated’ through co-production rather than enhanced (Bovaird et al. 2017; Williams et al. 2016, 692). Williams et al. (2016) suggest, in fact, that the erosion of public values in co-productive activity can occur as easily as the originally hoped-for value co-creation, when proper safeguards are not in place. However, the scholarly discussion of this problem is quite recent and therefore needs more time and empirical work to

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understand how co-produced public services can be constructed in ways that maintain public values.

Conclusion: Third-Sector, Four-Sector or Systems Theory? Third-sector theory has emerged on a relatively similar chronological path, but on a distinctly separate conceptual path from co-production theory. Both areas of theory are interested in effective delivery of services and also in the most successful forms of engagement between private, voluntary action and government. Both are evolving towards a more outcomes-oriented viewpoint on service delivery, and one that is able to address complex service ‘systems’ with more sophistication. Both have made efforts to expand their conceptual value to greater parts of the globe. Similar to co-production’s development as a way to reconcile Ostrom’s ‘great academic divide between the consumption and provision of public services’ (Brandsen et al. 2012, 1), voluntary sector theory has also wrestled with circumstances under which all three sectors must actively collaborate to realise public value. Co-production as a supply-side phenomenon also helps to fill an incomplete aspect of nonprofit theory, which has struggled to mature due to an overemphasis on its demand-side and gap-filling behaviours. And while political history, public policy and disciplinary silos have hampered the visibility of coproduction in third-sector scholarship, this chapter suggests that the links are there, offering three-lens theory, along with the developing interest in ‘institutionalised co-production’, as ways of describing co-production’s application to third-sector activity in language that third-sector scholars will understand. Coproduction not only realistically describes a generally effective public service delivery framework but also suggests that citizen action, whether individual or collective, is essential to achieve desired public outcomes. That same value of collective citizen action is seen in foundational arguments about the third sector (Etzioni 1973). When that collective action becomes nonprofit, however, theories central to third-sector theory building must still apply. Co-production as it is carried out through formal, private nonprofit organisations may still fall victim to various forms of philanthropic ‘failure’. Numerous examples abound of the danger of relinquishing public accountability in co-produced activities. Carrying forward the theme of ‘incomplete theory’, this chapter does not reconcile all questions. It makes an argument for co-production’s potential fit within the third-sector theory, but in doing so it invites the reader to make a choice about the third sector’s conceptual status. Is the third sector a ‘residual category for things that do not fit into …the state and the market’ (Corry 2010, 11) or is it an open system that invites both informal and formal collective citizen action without much care for legal status? The cases offered in this chapter provide a sobering argument for something in between. There is plentiful evidence for positive impacts from co-production, but also about the need

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for greater safeguards on co-productive activity, if not outright limits. Governments may co-opt citizen efforts. Co-producing citizens may fail to deliver on public values. And co-producing institutions may lose sight of public values as well. While co-production’s ‘empirical age’ is still under way, it is quite possible that, in the end, the research still finds service provision most successfully relies not on three sectors but on four, or at least on a fluid, hybrid, ‘systems’ view of relations between the sectors.

References Alessandrini, M. (2002). Is civil society an adequate theory? Third Sector Review, 8(2), 105–119. Alford, J. (2009). Engaging public sector clients: From service-delivery to co-production. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Alford, J. (2014). The multiple facets of co-production: Building on the work of Elinor Ostrom. Public Management Review, 16(3), 299–316. Bingham, L.B. (2009). Collaborative governance: Emerging practices and the incomplete legal framework for public and stakeholder voice. Journal of Dispute Resolution, 2, 269–326. Bovaird, T. (2007). Beyond engagement and participation: User and community coproduction of public services. Public Administration Review, 67 (5), 846–860. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2012). From engagement to co-production: The contribution of users and communities to outcomes and public value. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 23(4), 1119–1138. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2013). The role of co-production for better health and wellbeing: Why we need to change. In E. Loeffler, G. Power, T. Bovaird, & F. Hine-Hughes (Eds.), Co-production of health and wellbeing in Scotland (pp. 20–28). Birmingham, UK: Governance International. Bovaird, T., Flemig, S., Loeffler, E., & Osborne, S.P. (2017). Debate: Co-production of public services and outcomes. Public Money & Management, 37 (5), 363–364. Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2016). Distinguishing different types of co-production: A conceptual analysis based on the classical definitions. Public Administration Review, 76(3), 427–435. Brandsen, T., & Pestoff, V. (2006). Co-production, the third sector and the delivery of public services: An introduction. Public Management Review, 8(4), 493–501. Brandsen, T., Van de Donk, W., & Putters, K. (2005). Griffins or chameleons? Hybridity as a permanent and inevitable characteristic of the third sector. International Journal of Public Administration, 28(9–10), 749–765. Brandsen, T., Pestoff, V., & Verschuere, B. (2012). Co-production as a maturing concept. In Pestoff, V., Brandsen, T., & Verschuere, B. (Eds) (2013). New public governance, the third sector, and co-production (pp. 19–28). New York, NY: Routledge. Brewer, R., & Grabosky, P. (2014). The unraveling of public security in the United States: The dark side of police-community co-production. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 39(1), 139–154. Brudney, J.L. (2019). Rethinking co-production: Amplifying involvement and effectiveness. Journal of Chinese Governance, 5(1), 8–27.

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Parks, R.B., Baker, P.C., Kiser, L., Oakerson, R., Ostrom, E., Ostrom, V., Percy, S.L., Vandivort, M.B., Whitaker, G.P., & Wilson, R. (1981). Consumers as co-producers of public services: Some economic and institutional considerations. Policy Studies Journal, 9(7), 1001–1011. Pestoff, V., Brandsen, T., & Verschuere, B. (Eds.) (2012). New public governance, the third sector, and co-production. New York, NY: Routledge. Reagan, R. (1981, January 20). First presidential inaugural address. https://www.rea ganfoundation.org/media/128614/inaguration.pdf. Salamon, L.M. (1987). Of market failure, voluntary failure, and third-party government: Toward a theory of government-nonprofit relations in the modern welfare state. Journal of Voluntary Action Research, 16(1–2), 29-49. Salamon, L.M., & Anheier, H.K. (1992). In search of the non-profit sector. I: The question of definitions. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 3(2), 125–151. Salamon, L.M., & Anheier, H.K. (1998). Social origins of civil society: Explaining the nonprofit sector cross-nationally. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 9(3), 213–248. Schatteman, A., & Bingle, B. (2015). Philanthropy supporting government: An analysis of local library funding. Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, 1(2), 74–86. Steinberg, R. (2006). Economic theories of nonprofit organizations. In W.W. Powell & R. Steinberg (Eds.), The nonprofit sector: A research handbook (pp. 117–139). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Suslova, S. (2018). The determinants of collective co-production: The case of secondary schools in Russia. International Journal of Public Administration, 41(5–6), 401–413. United States Government Accountability Office. (2015, September). GAO 15–565: American Red Cross—Disaster assistance would benefit from oversight through regular federal evaluation. https://www.gao.gov/assets/680/672351.pdf. Van Til, J. (2000). Growing civil society: From nonprofit organization to third space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weisbrod, B.A. (1975). Toward a theory of the voluntary non-profit sector in a three-sector economy. In E. Phelps (Ed.), Altruism, morality, and economic theory (pp. 171–195). New York: Russell Sage. Williams, B.N., Kang, S.C., & Johnson, J. (2016). (Co)-Contamination as the dark side of co-production: Public value failures in co-production processes. Public Management Review, 18(5), 692–717. Young, D.R. (2000). Alternative models of government-nonprofit sector relations: Theoretical and international perspectives. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 29(1), 149–172.

PART IV

Co-commissioning of Public Services and Outcomes

CHAPTER 13

Co-commissioning at the Micro-Level: Personalised Budgets in Health and Social Care Editor Musekiwa and Catherine Needham

Introduction Whil most public services continue to be commissioned (i.e. planned and purchased) by large organisations, there are some pockets of what has been called co-commissioning, referring to community involvement in service planning and purchasing (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013, 5). A sub-category of this, focused on in this chapter, is micro co-commissioning, where individuals who use services are active participants in the planning and purchasing of their support. The policy area in which this is best developed is care for people with disabilities and age-related frailty, where there has been an international movement to enable individuals to gain control over support planning and budgets (Ungerson and Yeandle 2007; Pavolini and Ranci 2008; Timonen et al. 2006; Da Roit and Le Bihan 2010). There are also some examples of this happening in health, where people with chronic conditions are able to have some control over their care planning and spending (McMullin and Needham 2018; Coulter et al. 2015; Eikelenboom et al. 2016). Much of the literature has focused on the potentially transformative process of enabling previously marginalised and disempowered people to make decisions about their care (Glendinning 2008; Baxter et al. 2008; Barnes 2007; Ungerson 2004). Less attention has been paid to this as a co-commissioning space, in which people who use services work with professionals to make those decisions. This chapter explores what is known about co-commissioning at E. Musekiwa · C. Needham (B) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_13

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the micro-level, focusing particularly on England, although highlighting the growing evidence base from other countries. It also presents new empirical data about micro-level co-commissioning between patients and clinicians in the National Health Service (NHS), where some people with chronic conditions now have access to personal health budgets. This data demonstrates how co-commissioning works in the health context, and the strengths and weaknesses of the current approach. It also allows a comparison of the NHS experience with the larger evidence base for social care and draws attention to the ways in which dynamics of power and professionalism operate differently in the two service sectors. In our focus on the ‘micro’ level, we follow Greener (2003), who separated out micro, meso and macro elements of patient choice. Our unit of focus is the individual user of health and care services, but we also recognise that individuals may be embedded in families and communities and engage in co-commissioning with support from these broader networks (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013; Williams et al. 2012).

Personalised Budgets in Health and Social Care In many states around the world it has become common to shift to a more person-centred approach to health and care aimed at increasing the influence of individuals over their own care and treatment (Hyde and Davies 2004; Needham 2009; Glasby and Dickinson 2009; Grit and de Bont 2010; Marks et al. 2010; Yeatman et al. 2009). Although the rationale for this is disputed (and the synergies with consumerism and neo-liberalism are widely noted (Needham 2011), there is a clear rights-based thrust towards selfdetermination. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states: ‘All persons with disabilities have equal rights to live in the community, with choices equal to others, and member states shall take appropriate measures to facilitate full enjoyment by persons with disabilities of this right and their full inclusion and participation in the community’ (UN 1994). Writing about the care sector, Mansell and Beadle-Brown (2004, 3) suggest, ‘There is now no serious alternative to the principle that services should be tailored to individual needs, circumstances and wants’. Policy reforms to individualised funding for people with disabilities, older people and people using mental health services have been undertaken in a range of countries, including the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Canada and the USA (Gadsby 2013; Van Ginneken et al. 2012; Health Foundation 2010; Izuhara 2003; Grit and de Bont 2010; Glasby and Dickinson 2009; Alakeson 2010). In England individualised funding has been part of a wider ‘personalisation’ agenda: ‘Personalisation…means ensuring that people [using care services] have wider choice in how their needs are met and are able to access universal services such as transport, leisure and education, housing, health and opportunities for employment regardless of age or disability’ (SCIE 2009, 1). There has been a striking amount of political consensus

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about the importance of personalising adult social care, with little change of policy over a decade despite changes in governing party. Adult social care services encompass support for working age people with a disability, frail older people and people with mental health problems. In England, they are legally and institutionally separate from health services— sitting with local government rather than the NHS—and (unlike health) are means-tested. People who satisfy the means test can access the funding in a number of ways. Since 1996 they have been able to take the money as a ‘direct payment’, meaning that they hold the money themselves and spend it on an outcome agreed with a social worker. Low uptake of direct payments (particularly among older people) led to a renewed push towards individualised funding in the first decade of this century, and to a broader range of payment options, ratified in the Care Act 2014. These include a managed personal budget, which can be held by the local authority, and an individual service fund, held by the third party such as a charity. People have used their budgets to do a range of things (e.g. arrange respite care, buy a laptop), and most commonly to employ a personal assistant (PA) (In Control 2017a). A more recent initiative, which drew explicitly on the perceived success of personal budgets in social care, has been the extension of this approach into the NHS. In 2008 the government announced the piloting of individual budgets in the NHS for people with long-term health conditions (DH 2009). Personal health budgets are an allocated sum of money for the individual budget holder to purchase services, equipment and support to meet their identified health care and well-being needs, as planned and agreed with their local NHS team. The budget makes the financial aspect of healthcare more explicit at the individual level and puts the onus on them to identify and source the most appropriate services, manage the budget and be accountable for how it is spent (Gadsby 2013). Following an initial pilot phase, PHBs have now been rolled out nationally. Around 40,000 people have so far opted to use PHBs, with a government target of 200,000 PHB holders by 2023–24 (DHSC 2019). This compares to 500,000 people nationally who are accessing a personal budget for social care (National Audit Office 2018).

Personalised Care Budgets and Co-commissioning With over 20 years of experience of micro-commissioning of social care in England, there is an abundance of data about what people spend the money on, and some data on the extent that they are able to achieve improved outcomes. Less attention has been given to the co-commissioning process through which spending is planned, approved, evaluated and either continued or stopped. This section looks at elements of that co-commissioning process, focusing on the ‘co’ as relating to the dynamic between the person using services and the professional (social worker, care manager, support worker) who works with them to plan and fund their care. Although the idea of cocommissioning services with other service users was always a part of the vision

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for personalisation, in practice, there has been little evidence of this happening (Needham and Glasby 2014). The first point of interface between staff and users is often the point of assessment, where professionals decide whether or not people meet the means and needs test for accessing services. It is impossible to write about English care services over the last decade without acknowledging the impact of the huge cuts to local government budgets and the shrinking care spend. According to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS 2018, 28), social care spending by councils in England dropped by 11 per cent per adult resident in real terms between 2009/10 and 2015/16. Inevitably this has led to a reduction in the people who get through this initial gatekeeping phase. The King’s Fund and Nuffield Trust (2016, 3) report that, following six consecutive years of local authority cuts, 26 per cent fewer people receive help. This means that the people who come to be part of co-commissioning do so due to high levels of need. For older people, in particular, this means that they are likely to be at a level of frailty which may inhibit their scope to be active co-commissioners of care. Indeed, rates of direct payment uptake among older people continue to be less than half that of working age adults (NAO 2018). Many older people will be on a managed personal budget from the local authority, which often means little more than the delivery of a traditional care package. For people entering residential care services this is particularly likely to be the case, given limited progress on ‘personalization’ for care home residents (Ettelt 2018). It is also important to note that a substantial proportion of people with care needs fall outside of co-commissioning because they do not meet the local authority means test. This means that they fund their own care with little or no state involvement. This constitutes about half of older people receiving home and residential care (Henwood et al. 2018). Although the Care Act 2014 requires local authorities to help self-funders to set up their care if they would like help, very little of this co-commissioning happens in practice (Henwood et al. 2018). For those people who remain within scope of local authority financial support, their co-commissioning moves through a number of phases: • • • •

Allocation of a budget and agreement of a care plan Activation of the care plan Monitoring the spend and outcomes Review of the budget and care plan.

Studies of personalised care budgets have highlighted the different dynamics at work in these phases. In the initial phase of allocation of a budget and agreement of how the money can be spent, there is evidence of highly divergent practice between different local authorities, and indeed different social work teams within authorities. Some are relatively permissive, others are more constraining (Needham 2011). The Care Act 2014 envisages that the personal

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budgets would be the mechanism along with the care and support plan that would enable people to exercise greater choice and control over how their care and support needs are met. However, studies often show that local authorities can be reluctant to sign off on expenditure that does not look like traditional care spend. Glasby and Littlechild (2016, 135) highlight problems created by professional risk aversion and the fear of creating demands on already stretched budgets. Once the plan has been signed off, the service user plays a key role in activating what has been agreed. As Newman and Clarke observe, this is a process through which ‘individuals, households and families are coming to take on responsibilities previously viewed as state functions: coordinating their own care (or that of others), managing budgets, supervising staff and so on’ (2009, 97). Many people with a direct payment use it to pay for a personal assistant (PA), which usually requires becoming an employer and managing the associated costs, such as holiday and sick pay, insurance and any redundancy packages. In many localities, PAs can be hard to find and retain, and the responsibilities of being an employer can be difficult to manage both for the budget holder and the PA (Shakespeare et al. 2017). However, those people who are able to appoint a PA tend to report better outcomes than people using conventional agency care services (In Control 2017a). The auditing and oversight of budget expenditure is an area of microcommissioning where many local authorities have sought to retain control. The clawing back of unspent funds has been a particularly controversial aspect of this (In Control 2015), with local authorities seeing this as a valid reclaiming of public money and service users feeling that they are losing monies reserved for contingencies. After an initial period of more permissive spending, we can see a re-imposition of controls through the growth of prepayment cards, where budgets are loaded onto a payment card which can only be used to purchase certain items (In Control 2017b). The final phase of the co-commissioning process is the review phase. However, many local authorities report being behind on their review phase due to staff shortages. Budget holders are also often keen to avoid the review phase because of the risk of having their budget cut. Slasberg et al. (2012) suggest that the overly bureaucratic nature of the early assessment and allocation stages of personalisation has left less time for reviews of the service packages of existing users. Surveying a decade of personal budget expansion since the Putting People First initiative aimed to accelerate their take-up, it is evident that cocommissioning can see-saw between two extremes. In the first, the budget holder is given an allocation and then left to manage the process themselves, bearing all of the risk and the responsibility of spending the money appropriately. In the second, the local authority retains its dominance as commissioner through mechanisms such as pre-payment cards which make it difficult for budget holders to exercise choice and control in the process. Often these work as a corrective to each other—for example, stories in the media about

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people’s non-traditional spending choices can trigger a re-assertion of local authority control (Needham 2011). Genuine co-commissioning requires a more balanced and iterative process in which choice and risk is shared, and person-centeredness continues to be the key ambition.

Personal Health Budgets and Co-commissioning The co-commissioning of personal health budgets (PHBs) in the NHS is a relatively new and understudied area compared to social care. The devolving of budgets to patient level has been controversial among policymakers and professionals—with some seeing it as being at odds with the risk-pooling and universalist principles which underpin the NHS (Price 2015). When PHBs were launched in 2009, they were explicitly envisaged to be a co-productive initiative: ‘personalization of healthcare embodies coproduction. It means individuals working in partnership with their family, carers and professionals to plan, develop and procure the services and support that are appropriate for them’ (DH 2009, 23). Principles of co-production have encountered more barriers in health than in other public services, because of the distinctive role played by the medical profession as holders of expert knowledge (McMullin and Needham 2018). As Hyde and Davies (2004) point out, co-production requires a valuing of patient expertise and experience and a more equal relationship between patients and professions. Some medical professionals are resistant to this due to a fear that their expertise will be undervalued or undermined (Vennik et al. 2015). Co-production has been linked to asset-based approaches, which emphasise patients’ capabilities, whereas healthcare models have tended to see patients through the lens of deficit and impairment (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993). A key concept behind personal health budgets is the scope for service users to take charge of their health rather than being passive recipients of services provided by professionals (Alakeson 2013). With greater choice and control devolved to individuals, it is envisaged that service can be integrated better and management of long-term conditions improved, resulting in better outcomes, positive patient experience and a reduction in the cost of health care (Department of Health 2007; NHS England 2014): ‘As one carer said to a professional: “You may be the expert professional but I am the expert carer”’ (DH 2009, 23). This approach embodies a valuing of new sources of knowledge, in which patient or carer perspectives are recognised as a vital resource, particularly in relation to ‘micro’ level choices about care. It also shifts the conversation to one which involves money, which has not previously been an explicit part of doctor–patient dialogue in the UK. The Department of Health recognised the extent to which this would shift the doctor–patient discussions, and the difficulties that this may present for some doctors: ‘We recognize that practitioners in direct contact with the person receiving care and support may well find it uncomfortable to discuss the cost implications of different choices … [T]raining will be needed to help professionals to develop protocols for

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sensitive discussions with people whose care and support they are helping to plan’ (DH 2009, 28). Following a review of the NHS by Lord Darzi in 2008, which focused on reforming the health care system, the government initiated a pilot programme of personal health budgets for people with long-term conditions. In 2014, some categories of people with long-term conditions gained the right to have a personal health budget NHS England (2014). Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) can also offer personal health budgets to other patients that they feel may benefit from the additional flexibility and control (NHS England 2014, 2017). Central to a personal health budget is the personalised care and support plan (NHS England 2015; Coulter et al. 2015). This is a written care and support plan that is supposed to be developed in partnership with the health professional and the individual budget holder and those who support them. It forms the basis for the conversations between the individual and the clinical professionals, on what matters to the individual and how that can be achieved. According to NHS England (2015), the care and support plan should clearly indicate the type of support needed, how it will be achieved and how much money will be available to spend on the care. This should then be reviewed regularly to see what is working and not working and whether it is the best support for the individual, providing shared information and expertise to coproduce better outcomes. Alongside the pilot programme, a three-year evaluation was commissioned. The aim was to identify whether personal health budgets delivered better health and care outcomes compared to conventional methods of service delivery. The results of the pilot and evaluation programme reported a positive impact on care-related quality of life and well-being and cost effectiveness but not on health outcomes. Nevertheless, the evaluation recommended a wider roll-out (Forder et al. 2012). Further follow-up work was commissioned by the Department of Health, which found that personal health budgets can improve outcomes and people’s sense of control and empowerment. The care planning process was highlighted as a vital component of the process in meeting individual health and care needs (Jones et al. 2017, 2018).

Personal Health Budgets in Practice Given the limited existing evidence base on personal health budgets, this section draws on findings from a new study of PHBs conducted by the first author (Editor Musekiwa). Using a realist evaluation approach of identifying context, mechanisms and outcomes, ethnographic case studies were conducted over a two-year period in a naturalistic field setting, including participants’ own home or community. The prolonged nature of fieldwork enabled observations of interactions of structures and agency in everyday life as they changed over time.

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Recruitment of respondents was voluntary, through a self-referral process. The cases were individuals with complex healthcare needs, who were PHB holders and had been using their PHB for a year or longer. Initially six cases were identified; three then dropped out due to ill-health, highlighting the challenges of doing research with this group. The cases whose data informed this research were from three different CCGs in different geographical locations. They were two women and one man, all with physical disabilities, all white and all in their 40s, educated to degree level or equivalent. They were employed in leadership positions, owned their own businesses or were advocates with various service user groups. It is recognised that their professional experience and advocacy roles may make them untypical of other PHB holders. However, given the difficulties of recruiting from this population, access to the experiences of these participants is a vital part of building the broader evidence base around PHB experiences. Ethical approval was given by the Health Research Authority (17/IEC08/0034). Data was collected using observations, semi-structured interviews, field notes, documents and artifacts. Through these rich and nuanced accounts of the lived experience of PHB holders, the study explored how individualised budgets were working in practice. Using thematic analysis, along with abductive inference, the analysis phase linked the observed accounts to the contexts in which PHB operate. Findings are presented below. Where quotes from the data are used, participant names have been changed to pseudonyms.

Co-commissioning as a Longitudinal Process The ethnographic nature of the study meant it was possible to work with people through the early stages of accessing PHB through to later stages when the PHB was being reviewed and evaluated. Here we present the key findings between year one and two, highlighting again the tendency for the balance of co-commissioning to shift over time between professional dominance and user control, and the value of longitudinal research in illuminating this shift. Year One What emerged strongly from the early phases of ethnography was how illequipped professionals were to deal with PHBs: Karen:

They have got no experience of managing a care plan and yet they’re allowed to make the decisions on how I spend my money and it makes no sense to me.

Linked to this, PHB holders reported feeling a sense that they lacked support through the care planning process:

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What’s happened here in our area is that there has been very little support with care planning and support, so people are kind of just left to their own devices.

In particular, the co-commissioning process as a relational space where decisions were made was felt to be inadequate: Steve:

Karen:

Cora:

When they came to do my assessment and they said I [would probably qualify for a PHB], I said ‘you [swears] make sure I better qualify because I know I do’. I was actually assessed just after the Care Act [2014] came out and there was no real care planning, so the clinician comes out, assesses your eligibility but doesn’t actually discuss how you want to meet those needs. There was nothing in place for chatting with me about how I wanted to use the money or how I wanted to go forward with my personal health budget and that in itself is a massive fail because it’s not person centred, you just trot off make up a number and give it to me and that’s it. They do a yearly review and I have not had one person do my care plan more than once, so it’s really down to interpretation.

Steve gave a more positive account, in which the inexperience of clinicians and managers was used as a shared learning experience: Steve:

For me when my care plan was put together, my joint care manager came out and said we are only really getting started on this and we can all really learn a lot from you, what is it that you want to get out of this. And when they were putting my care plan together, I literally gave them a mini biography off my website, and she copied and pasted that into my care plan.

Delays were common—such that one of the PHB holders was getting access to her budget without being given sign off on what she could spend it on. Karen:

I still don’t have a support plan and I am now a year and 6 months into this personal health budget and I still don’t have the care and support in place. The money still keeps coming in, I am not being supported still. They are issues related to the way I want to spend the money they are having to look into, it’s taking a long time and that means everything is in a bit of limbo actually.

The pressures of the process led some of the participants to withdraw from the direct payment option (in which they hold the money themselves):

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Cora:

The responsibility was making me ill and I have now opted for third party option.

Issues of ownership and control were paramount as people talked about their experiences: Steve:

Karen:

Because I have not had [a recent health crisis], they would reduce funding and that would increase the risk of actually having one and this is now happening to PHBs. Essentially as I see it, they have no right to tell me how to spend that money, if I am coming the other end as healthy and as happy and better than I would have had they delivered the care, then they have no right to tell me how to spent the money in the middle. I am not using more than I was meant to use in a conventional way. Year Two

The longitudinal nature of the ethnography allowed an appreciation of how the experiences of the PHB holders changed over time, reflecting the learning process for both PHB holders and professionals as PHBs came to be more embedded. A year later, Karen was in a better position: Karen:

Steve:

Cora:

This time round I have submitted my care and support plan and I think most things apart from a couple they are looking into, have been authorised. Whereas before there was nit-picking, there was arguing, there was resistance… …I think my relationship with my PHB team is different and they recognise that I am quite capable of identifying ways I would like to spend the money and they have been openly suggestive of different ways of doing things. I would say for the first time I have sat with someone and looked at what my proper needs are for a wheelchair and looked at what’s out there in the market, compared to previously. This year things were a lot different. I had a meeting in February with my PHB Support Officer (the person who dealt with my budget) and my…case manager (who deals with the support plan side of things) came to see me face to face and we went over my care and support plan and what I wanted. I was able to raise concerns about my budget and was able to explain things as things came up. Having both of these people in the same room meant that we could talk about money and how this would meet my needs at the same time.

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The experience of PHBs therefore highlights the importance of building expertise and relationships over time. As Cora’s quote above indicates, this can be about getting the right professionals in the room together, as well as building bilateral relationships between a service user and a professional. The change over time can be interpreted as indicative of the implementation of any policy—as staff and the people affected come to learn more about how to work with it effectively. However, what appeared to change between year one and year two was not only the knowledge base of the participants but also the willingness to trust and listen to the PHB holders—suggesting that there was a cultural shift within the implementation process as well as an increase in understanding. The role of peer support is also important, along with sharing of success stories with professionals who may have been sceptical about PHBs. These narratives seem to be more powerful than research evidence, as demonstrated in the case of Steve, whose work involves facilitation and presenting his story to professionals: Steve:

One of the social workers was saying she was having several discussions with her bosses on PHBs, they were saying…there is no real benefit. But [when] I mentioned the cost savings with the district nurses, [it] was like a light bulb to her and she said she can now go to her bosses and say look I have real examples.

Conclusion Through discussion of the experience of micro co-commissioning in the health and care sectors in England, we can see the dynamics that are at work when users and professionals come together to plan and purchase care. Here we have compared the relatively mature experiences of co-commissioning in the care sector with the more emergent experiences of personal health budgets in the NHS. In particular it is evident that co-commissioning is a balance between professional control and user control, and over time (and between settings) it is likely to shift. In social care that has often meant tipping between one of two poles. The accounts of the PHB holders, on the other hand, showed the scope for more positive learning over time where health professionals are willing to reflect and share control. The PHB data presented here gives some reason for optimism in the co-commissioning process as it plays out over time. It is, of course, important to note that we cannot generalise from our sample, and that there is wide geographic variety between areas in terms of access to and support for personal health budget take-up. The findings presented here do reaffirm the broader insights into coproduction as an activity which is sustained and relational. Ostrom’s classic work on co-production highlights the importance of a ‘credible commitment’ from both parties, ‘so that if one side increases input, the other will continue

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at the same or higher levels’ (Ostrom 1996, 1082). Trust and learning are clearly vital to this process (Durose et al. 2017). The work of Kirkegaard and Andersen (2018) on co-production draws attention to a more radical relational challenge—they suggest that co-production generates new questions of ‘who we are in relation to one another’ (2018, 831). This is evident in the accounts of the PHB holders as they gain more credibility over time as experts on their own conditions, working with professionals as peers. Much of the literature on co-production has provided the staff perspective on changing relationships, including anxieties professionals feel as the boundaries start to fray. Here instead we have given the perspective from the service user, as they become involved in different kinds of relationships with professionals over time.

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CHAPTER 14

A Strategic Management Approach to Co-commissioning Public Services Edoardo Ongaro, Cristina Mititelu, and Alessandro Sancino

Introduction This chapter explores the relationships between commissioning and coproduction from a strategic management of public services point of view (Ferlie and Ongaro 2015). Specifically, the aim of this chapter is conceptualising strategic commissioning and, by extension, co-commissioning of services with users and communities, within the framework of the co-production logic. Conceptualising commissioning in terms of co-production introduces a critical element to be considered, namely the role of the publics, which provides commissioners with a new strategic viewpoint by bringing the publics more fully into the commissioning process. A high-quality commissioning, as Dickinson (2015, 7) puts it, requires indeed a person-centred and outcomefocused approach which is inclusive and sustainable. In this respect, a model of co-production orientated commissioning can play a role to ‘co-create public

E. Ongaro (B) The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] C. Mititelu Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership (CVSL), The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK A. Sancino Department of Public Leadership & Social Enterprise, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_14

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value through the achievement of outcome improvement in public services’ (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019, 251). Scholars and practitioners have offered various definitions of co-production (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013; Nabatchi et al. 2017; Boyle and Harris 2009); here we use them in the context of commissioning by dint of their different and complementary merits. Bovaird and Loeffler (2012, 1121) define user and community co-production as ‘professionals and citizens making better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes or improved efficiency’. This definition brings to the fore the ‘reciprocity’ and focuses on the achievement of ‘better outcomes’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012). It brings the recognition that users and the broader community can make a decisive contribution to the provision of public services, given the fact that ‘the production and consumption of many services are inseparable’ and ‘the quality of a service depends upon close interaction between the customer and provider’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013, 1). This definition has many merits, including calling for a focus on outcomes and entailing that a vast range of instruments can be deployed to co-create value in co-production between professionals and citizens. A second useful definition is offered by Nabatchi et al. (2017, 769), who define co-production as ‘an umbrella concept that captures a wide variety of activities that can occur in any phase of the public service cycle and in which state actors and lay actors work together to produce benefits’. This definition has the merit of locating co-production along the public service cycle, which would include co-commissioning as the first of four stages (the others being co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment). A third definition is provided by Boyle and Harris (2009, 11) who define co-production as ‘delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using the services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change’. This definition helps to bring into the discussion a critical strategic element, in our view, by shifting the focus from ‘public services organisations’ to ‘systems of public services organisations embedded in places’ which would include, for example, not only users and professionals but also families and neighbours. This definition highlights also the importance of equal and reciprocal relationships. As regards the other conceptual pillar of this chapter, namely strategic management, we suggest explaining public decision-making processes through the theoretical lens of strategic management, in the way it has been conceptualised by Ferlie and Ongaro (2015). Notably, we argue that a strategic management approach is particularly apt to shed light on the transition from commissioning to (strategic) co-commissioning. More precisely, we point to the importance of strategic management in (co) commissioning by strategically

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calling into existence diverse and representative publics (Moore and Fung 2012) and by enabling processes of place-based learning within and across organisations and citizens with their multiple roles (e.g. customer, citizen, partner, see Thomas 2013). The chapter is organised as follows. First, we set co-commissioning into the context of different narratives of administrative and public governance reforms. The chapter then unpacks the definition and models of commissioning and locates co-commissioning in the commissioning cycle. We then elaborate our core argument about how certain approaches (characterised by Ferlie and Ongaro as ‘schools of thought’) for conceiving of the strategic management of public services can be used to interpret and explain processes of strategic co-commissioning. We conclude by wrapping up on the key concepts discussed throughout the chapter.

Governance and Administrative Reform Narratives and Commissioning Historically, after WWII, the role of the State in Western countries was first defined by the development of the welfare State (1960s and 1970s) and later by a more regulatory role for the State in light of neoliberal orientations on the rise since the 1980s (with possibly some backtracking since the outburst of the financial, economic and fiscal crises in 2007/2008). The welfare State posited the role of the State as an active actor intervening in society to ‘make use of government resources to produce general welfare in society’ and implied ‘an expansion of social services, social insurance and social rights’, while the neoliberal position depicted an enabler role of the State in society with the main task of ‘making available the general public goods and the guarantee of economic freedom’ (Schedler and Proeller 2010, 13). The enabler role of the State, as envisioned and supported by some NPM tenets, is that of ‘steering rather than rowing’ (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), thus separating steering (policy functions) from rowing (delivery functions). Particularly, within the delivery functions, the State should encourage co-provision of public services both by private and civil society actors. However, with the emergence of more complex public needs and schizophrenic relationships between the State, on one hand, and the dominant capitalist economic system more and more financialised and the increasingly technologically enabled and more demanding glocalised society, on the other hand (Brandsen et al. 2017; Bloom and Sancino 2019; Crouch 2004), the models of both the welfare and the neoliberal State showed their limitations (also due to the long-term effects of the fiscal crises—see Kickert and Ongaro, 2020; Ongaro and Kickert, 2020). While the broad conception of the State represents the backdrop against which to see commissioning, it is the finer-grained texture of the specific public governance context in which commissioning processes occur that more

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directly influences it. In this respect, one way of analysing the public governance context is by examining the main administrative reform narratives, at both a factual and an ideational level; we mainly focus on the ideational level. We can think of reform narratives in public administration through the lens of concepts like those of ‘models’, or ‘paradigms’, or ‘quasi-paradigms’ (on the idea of quasi-paradigms in public administration, see Torfing et al. 2020; on the usage of the notion of paradigms and quasi-paradigms, see Margetts and Dunleavy 2013; for a review of the ideas of model and paradigm as conceptual tools in public administration, see Ongaro 2017/2020, Chapter 8). Our underlying assumption is that reform narratives form part and parcel of the ‘context’ (Pollitt 2013) influencing the logics through which funders usually make commissioning decisions. The debate about commissioning, which is extensively a UK practice-led model of funding, emerged in the 1980s within a context of New Public Management (NPM) narratives. This model advocated change through the import of business models in the public sector, like performance management, and leveraging market-type mechanisms—competition and choice—and wrapping up this narrative into notions at times vaguely defined as ‘catalytic government’ and ‘result-oriented government’, i.e. focused on outcomes rather than inputs, and rewarding success by performance metrics (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). Ferlie et al. (1996) pointed out the ‘3 Ms’ narrative as the guiding principle of NPM, namely: (i) Markets (efficiency drive); (ii) Management—professionally trained managers able to identify and manage ‘success’ (strategic management , albeit in a narrow sense); and (iii) Measurement metrics and performance measurement against these metrics. The NPM narrative impacted on the ‘first wave’ of commissioning mostly through introducing Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) (Bovaird and Davies 2011). The key logic of CCT lies in systematically comparing, for each main area of public services, the economic convenience of direct delivery by the State (hereby encompassing all levels of government, national or local) with the alternative of contracting the provision of the service out to private providers. In this sense it can be seen as a key privatisation measure, enforcing a market-orientated and competition-driven approach in the provision of public services. This reform initiative ultimately favoured the provision of public services at the lowest possible cost, possibly to the detriment of quality and, we would argue, to the detriment of users’ involvement. To try to redress the issue of poor quality (but not or not significantly, we would argue, the issue of limited users’ involvement), CCT has been replaced in the late 1990s by the so-called ‘Best Value’ approach (in local government): while a stronger emphasis on the quality of public services may be detected in the Best Value reform rhetoric, the ‘purchaser-provider split’ has continued to be an integral component of public sector reform narratives (Bovaird and Davies 2011).

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A ‘quasi-paradigmatic’ shift in commissioning happened in the 2000s, with an emerging approach named ‘strategic commissioning’ (Bovaird and Davies 2011). The concept has emerged as the ‘dominant discourse, consistent with the broad NPM principle of the purchaser– provider split and the “enabling state”, implying that the state continues to step back from direct delivery’ (Rees 2014, 49). Bovaird and Davies (2011, 94) underline a growing systematic attempt to put outcome-based strategies, rather than outputs, at the very centre of government decision-making (Rees 2014). The 2006 White Paper highlighted the vital role of strategic commissioning in ‘place-shaping’ and the need for local authorities to work more through partnerships (Bovaird and Davies 2011, 101–102). Such transformations in commissioning go hand in hand with broader shifts in reform narratives, notably the rise of the New Public Governance (NPG) (e.g. Osborne 2006), and the New Public Service (NPS) (Denhardt and Denhardt 2003) approaches, bringing a marked focus on more participatory processes and procedures across the policymaking cycle (e.g. Fung 2006; Nabatchi et al. 2017). Denhardt and Denhardt (2003, xi), in their work on NPS, argue that public administrators do not deliver customer services, but they ultimately provide democracy. In line with this argument, Perry (2007, 7–8) points out that NPS builds upon such principles as: (a) serve citizens, not customers, (b) seek the public interest and value citizenship over entrepreneurship, (c) think strategically, act democratically, (d) recognise that accountability is not simple, (e) serve rather than steer, (f) value people, not just productivity. Complementarily, NPG proponents (e.g. Jackson 2001; Salamon 2002) put a focus on the external environment and the policy networks on which public organisations depend to achieve their institutional aims. More widely, some important elements of co-production are brought to the fore in both the NPG and the NPS ‘quasi-paradigms’, an overall thrust which encourages the engagement of citizens in all phases of the policy cycle (Denhardt and Denhardt 2003). Such shifts in the ideational landscape contributed to legitimise and enable more interactive and collaborative approaches in the commissioning process. This is evident in the rhetoric on the role of citizens: in the early waves of commissioning, an active role for citizens was rarely mentioned and, when it was, it was essentially seen as a consultative role, for example in helping to establish the priorities between needs or outcomes (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019, 244), while such role for the citizen has taken much more preminence in the wake of the surge of the NPG and NPS reform doctrines. Table 14.1 sums up some of these reform doctrines and their influence on conceptions of commissioning process.

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Table 14.1 Core ideas of NPM and NPG/NPS influencing (co-)commissioning New public management

New public governance/New public service

Focus on cost reduction/Increasing competition in service provision for cost reduction Input–output contracts/generic outcomes Market and quasi-market mechanisms. Privatisation and contracting out of governmental services Compulsory competitive tendering/market testing Purchaser (orderer)—contractor (provider) model/split Management by objectives or results/targets/measurement of performance/ Inwards focus on business management techniques and performance

Personalised outcomes based on need Network management; horizontal types of steering Using knowledge from societal actors to improve the quality of policy and public services Focus on the interorganisational dimension of policymaking and service delivery Outwards focus and systematic approach

Source Own elaboration on CIPS (2010), Osborne and Gaebler (1992), Perry (2007), Denhardt and Denhardt (2003), Salamon (2002)

A Conceptualisation of the Commissioning Cycle and Co-commissioning The traditional use of the term ‘commissioning’ refers to ‘a consistent implication that something is being taken forward on behalf of someone else, or some other authority like instruction or an obligation’ (Hunter 2019, 8). In practice, the word is often interchangeably used with, and limited to, ‘procurement’ or ‘purchasing’ (Murray 2009, 198). However, certain strands in the scientific literature argue that commissioning is not just about purchasing services and contracting, and in this perspective commissioning is thought of instead as a cycle of activities that includes procurement as well as other management techniques (Local Government Association 2013, 17) but without being reduced only to these management techniques (NCVO 2018; CIPS 2010; Macmillan 2010; Murray 2009); in this perspective, commissioning: (i) systematically considers the economic, environmental and social outcomes for a given place; (ii) encompasses the role played by the very commissioning organisation in bringing about such outcomes; (iii) involves the assessment of all available means to achieve these outcomes; and (iv) consists of the adoption of the principle of ‘right sourcing’, that is, determining the best way of meeting outcomes, including through contributions of people and communities. Not all commissioning is co-commissioning, though: it is also important to underline that ‘commissioning is still in development in theory and practice (…) and operates at different scales between national and local levels’ (Rees 2014, 46) and it is useful ‘to view it as operating on a continuum between “collaborative” commissioning, on one side, and “commissioning on price/procurement”, on the other side’ (Rees 2014, 50). There have

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been, however, more recently reform trends that have emphasised collaborative commissioning. In the UK context, the varied reforms provided a number of ways to give the public more power over service decisions; for example, the UK Government’s Localism Act (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013) had implications on co-commissioning in the terms of a set of proposals for extending innovative payment and funding mechanisms, such as personal budgets and payment by results. Various terms like ‘strategic commissioning’ or ‘outcome-based commissioning’ or ‘payment by results’ (or ‘Social Impact Bond’, SIB, from 2010) have in common the emphasis on orientating commissioning towards outcomes (Colgan et al. 2015), opening up ‘the possibility that service user perceptions may play a significant role in the measurement of these outcomes’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013, 7). In broader terms, the SIB is ‘a partnership aimed at improving the social outcomes for a specific group of citizens or beneficiaries’ (Carter et al. 2018, 7). The story here is that if traditionally the term ‘commissioning’ has been used to refer to contracting, very much as synonymous of purchasing of services, it subsequently progressively evolved towards a broader usage in terms of a bundle of processes underpinning the provision of public services. A number of governments departments, agencies and think tanks have developed models of commissioning as a bundle of processes, such as the South Australia Health Clinical Commissioning Framework (Australia) or the Alliance Contracting (New Zealand) (see Colgan et al. 2015). These applied models—often quite prescriptive in tone—stem from the world of practice. A widely used model is the interlinked stages model—as for example, the Institute of Public Care (IPC) Commissioning Cycle model (Bovaird et al. 2012; Loeffler and Bovaird 2019)—which outlines a series of broad interlinked tasks (needs analysis, priority setting, service design, marketshaping/procurement, monitoring and evaluation) which configure commissioning as a bundle of processes, although it is also argued that in practice it is unlikely to often see such a tidy continual interaction between activities, rather a focus on the procurement stage might tend to prevail. The IPC Commissioning Cycle model has been adopted across many UK government departments (Bovaird et al. 2012) and applied in a range of sectors, including health, social care and education The model draws a distinction between the commissioning cycle and the purchasing/contracting cycle, while emphasising the core commissioning aim is securing outcomes for people. In a co-production logic, the tasks of the commissioning cycle are integrated by the diverse roles of the public and their rationales as co-producers (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019) to be part of a full cycle of activities at varying levels (co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment). The relation to co-production in the commissioning cycle occurs here as a means to bring the ‘co-doing’ or ‘doing with’ approach into public policy and service provision, at different stages of the public policy cycle (Slay and Penny 2014; Mititelu 2019). The phase of ‘Analyse’, as a task of the commissioning cycle

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with a co-production dimension, ‘shows that [it] is no longer sufficient to ask people about their needs’ and that ‘commissioners also need to co-analyse individual and collective assets with service users and local communities’ (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019, 245). The experience by users of services and their broader expertise (technical or otherwise) available in the community becomes a key resource in this perspective. For example, some local authorities in the UK have embarked on significant degrees of consultation to set out the preferences of the council in terms of blocks of outcomes and priorities to be addressed yearly or over longer time frames (e.g. resource analysis; co-prioritisation of outcomes frameworks; review service provision; participatory budgeting). The key activities in a co-produced commissioning cycle will be based on ‘joint analysis of needs, public sector and community assets, and risk of service failure’ as well as ‘joint identification of future opportunities to bring citizens into commissioning cycle’ (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019, 246). In the pursuit of the goal of integrating a co-production approach also in the subsequent phases, the public service commissioners have to consider a mix of strategies to embed co-production within the commissioning cycle by incorporating ‘citizen voice’ and ‘citizen action’ (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019) at the various stages: ‘analyse’ (co-commissioning for priorities and outcomes); ‘plan’ (co-design phase, based on the planning task involved such as developing tender service specifications); ‘do’ (co-delivery model where citizens are included in the actual ‘doing of the services’); and ‘review’ (co-assessment mode of contract monitoring and review of outcomes) (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019). Figure 14.1 depicts and summarises critical features within the (co) commissioning process and rationales behind the process based on extant scientific and policy literature. Bovaird and Loeffler (2013, 5) include within cocommissioning (a) co-planning of policy—for example, deliberative participation; (b) co-prioritising of services—for example, personalisation, participatory budgeting and (c) the co-financing of services—for example, fundraising. In commissioning & co-production

co-commissioning co-production

Co-production

First phase

Strategic planning at the initial stage

Process

Process Public engagement

Joint/co-working relationships

‘Analyse’

Informed decision making/ devolving decision making

Specific to

Strategic planning

social needs

palnning

Choice/better use s of resource allocation and assets

Social needs Strategic voice

Co- commissioning /coproduction

Value for money

Co-commissioning

Meeting needs, Context

Learning market/ collaborative /competitive

Greater efficacy and responsiveness

From assessing needs to

specific

implementation and evidence

Meeting needs, users’ outcomes

Enhanced capacity of providers/community to interact

Fig. 14.1

citizen

planning

Context specific

Commissioning/

Co-Planning Co-Priorities Co-financing

Core features and rationales to (co) commissioning

users’ outcomes

citizen assets

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terms of strengthening local governance, participatory budgeting might bring local people, depending on local circumstances, into making decisions on the spending and priorities in a public budget (see Participatory Budgeting UK (2020), at https://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/). The development of co-commissioning opens up the debate about the significance of ‘assets’ and ‘being assets aware’ in the commissioning for outcomes within the provision of public services. Field and Miller (2017, 68– 69) argue for a paradigm shift from conventional commissioning (embryonic and outcome-based commissioning) to ‘asset-aware commissioning’, which entails a transformation of citizens from mere subjects–recipients of public service and customers to co-producers, thereby becoming a ‘resource’ to learn from (Mititelu 2019, 12). Thus ‘asset-based commissioning explicitly values, and seeks to actively support, the roles that personal and community self-help play in producing outcomes’ (Field and Miller 2017, 82). Governance International (2019) highlight that co-commissioning public services with service users and communities means ‘using their knowledge and expertise, to prioritise which services to provide, using public resources and the resources of communities’.

Combining Strategic Management and Commissioning: Towards Strategic Co-Commissioning Research work bridging the strands of scientific literature of co-production and collaborative governance with the stream of inquiry into how to apply the field of strategic management to public services has been developed since the second decade of the century (e.g. in the fifth edition of Bryson’s well-renowned book on strategic planning, Bryson 2018). As part of this movement, Ongaro et al. (2020) apply the approach of the ‘schools of thought in the strategic management of public services’ (spearheaded by Ferlie and Ongaro 2015; for empirical applications see Ongaro and Ferlie 2019 and 2020) to patterns of collaboration within public services with a focus on cocreation. The goal of this research endeavour is employing the scholarly field of strategic management (as an academic discipline) for an improved understanding of how decisions to engage in forms of co-creation are made by public organisations. Following up on that intellectual exercise, this chapter similarly selects certain schools of thought in strategic management to discuss how they may shed light on the process dynamics of co-commissioning, and notably how they can help explain patterns of decision-making leading to a transition from commissioning to co-commissioning. Formulated more directly, and in a way that is suffused with a normative tone, the chapter aims to show that a strategically led public sector organisation may more effectively enact co-commissioning. In other words, it seeks to substantiate the notion of ‘strategic commissioning’ by giving substance to the qualification of ‘strategic’.

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Three approaches to the strategic management of public organisations seem especially pertinent to the debate: the public value school, the strategic planning school and the learning school. They are examined in turn. Public Value School —linking the ‘place’ and ‘local-based’ approach to cocommissioning . Central to this school of thought in strategic management is the notion of ‘creation of public value’, defined as the impact on public needs (collectively identified and selected through democratic means), determined as both ‘what the public values’ and ‘what adds value to the public sphere’, also by resorting to the notion of use value, as opposed to market value (Benington and Moore 2011, 42–49 in particular). The main thrust of this approach lies in the pursuit of better value for society through fostering the capacity of public managers to be more entrepreneurial and engage in innovation capable of effecting the creation of public value (Benington and Moore 2011). Public managers are here seen as stewards of public value more than as loyal/unimaginative (depending on one’s view) agents of politicians, and they are thought of as acting towards the creation of a ‘strategic oriented environment’ defined by specific policy goals to attain public outcomes, as well as by working with different organisations and communities at various stages, to achieve the strategic objectives. This process has an impact on all the actors involved in mobilising knowledge, resources, assets and building ‘capacity’. The transition from more risk-averse, traditional rule-based commissioning towards co-commissioning becomes in this perspective another pattern whereby public managers may act as stewards of public value: the Public Value School may thus explain why public managers effect the transitioning from traditional commissioning to co-commissioning. What is especially interesting in the application of the public value perspective to co-commissioning is that it leads to consider commissioning, which is by definition based on market value, in creative ways such that it can ultimately lead to generating public value, which at its core is defined through the notion of use value. This hiatus can only be filled with imaginative and creative ways of engaging a multiplicity of actors in what becomes a co-owned public space (Bryson et al. 2017). The public value model—to which Loeffler and Bovaird (2019) make reference—provides a conceptual framework for commissioning and coproduction and highlights that public outcomes can be achieved directly through co-production with service users and local communities and by enacting behaviour change on the part of citizens (e.g. Sancino 2016). The starting point, according to the authors, is the ‘expressed needs’ by locals and the community, and the model highlights how behaviour change of users, when embedded in the commissioning process, might transform these needs. User and community co-production appears as a key driver for improving publicly valued outcomes (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012). Outcomes are a crucial aspect in the co-commissioning process and might be achieved at the individual service level (a direct result of a service on service users) or community-level outcomes (broader social, environmental

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and economic outcomes)—both of which enable commissioners to generate public value across the triple bottom line (Slay and Penny 2014). The phase of defining those initial outcomes to be achieved happens at the level of co-commissioning. For these reasons, many local councils in the UK are developing outcome frameworks for the services to be delivered with their users and communities. It happens mainly in the health and social care services, as for example in services for young people with disabilities, but it is applied also outside these sectors. Bovaird et al. (2012, 14) state that strategic commissioning is broad, locating it as a vital part of ‘place-shaping’. However, there are also some barriers identified in co-commissioning with user and communities, and also co-production in general (e.g. funding and commissioning barriers, the need to address the lack of capacity and professional skills, riskaverse behaviour of commissioners, Bovaird and Loeffler 2012), thus requiring careful consideration on how to design such activities. The cases in Box 14.1 may provide some indications of ‘how extraordinary results both in terms of improved outcomes and cost savings can be achieved if this is done effectively’ (Governance International 2020). Box 14.1 Cases of place and local-based approaches to co-commissioning 1—Transforming Services for Young People in Surrey County Council, UK Participants: government, high risk and low-income groups, young people. Surrey County Council used co-commissioning to address: 1. Socio-economic issues (data from 2003 to 2012): around 1000 young people were not in education, employment or training (NEET). 2. Political goals: a strong focus on improving outcomes for young people. 3. Budgetary cuts: a reduction in the budget of the service by 25% over three years. The programme aimed to achieve a better understanding of needs and the social change requested in the local community. The designed model of engagement based on collecting direct perceptions of the young people, which resulted in a comprehensive need assessment process. A young people’s outcome framework has been developed, by using the consultation mechanisms with varied stakeholders, including young people and partners. The model enabled to use outcome-based commissioning approaches and to choose the best providers for the new operating models. In terms of results, since April 2012, the model has continued to evolve to adapt to changing needs of young people. It is deemed to have to date achieved some significant improvements in outcomes for young people across a range of social policy issues, including participation, youth offending and homelessness. It had a positive impact on the service quality in terms of responsiveness, reliability and customer satisfaction. Source Tisdall (2014) 2—Urban Mediaspace in Aarhus (Denmark)

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The Aarhus Library Building (named ‘house of the citizens’) was built with extensive collaboration between the Aarhus municipality, architects, citizens and future users. There has been an intensive implication of the citizens in the design process of the library. The approach behind user engagement has been to develop a dynamic library while combining interactivity, media, people and space, and involving the people who are going to use it. The ambitions were to create a democratic space that stimulates network, informal learning and personal growth; an outstanding area for civic education, experience and knowledge-based activities, while facilitating and developing new formats for citizens’ involvement and creating partnerships to ensure co-creation of activities. Source https://www.e-architect.co.uk/aarhus/aarhus-library

Strategic planning school —viewing co-commissioning as part of commissioning process tasks. Colgan et al. (2015, 15–16) refer to the commissioning process as a ‘strategic, cyclical process with interlinked stages and tasks, where the elements of the process work together to deliver coherent strategic planning and resource allocation’ as well as a ‘long-term strategic planning tool that seeks to link resource allocation with critical policy objectives’, including (a) value for money; (b) meeting present and future needs; (c) quality improvement; (d) service user outcomes (emphasis added). Thus, the commissioning process involves strategic thinking and decisions at different stages (Murray 2009, 199). An implication is that linear planning does not work, as commissioning requires a plurality of views to be involved throughout the process. Set against this backdrop about what the commissioning process should be about, the strategic planning school seems to provide an apt theoretical source. If we adopt a broad conception of strategic planning as a form of practical reasoning that goes well beyond more conventional approaches to the formulation of the strategic plan (Bryson 2018; Ferlie and Ongaro 2015, Chapter 2), then strategic planning can furnish an apt way of interpreting how public managers as strategic planners may drive a transition from commissioning to co-commissioning (Box 14.2 highlights an example of co-commissioning evidencing the importance of needs assessment and strategic planning). Box 14.2 A case of strategic planning for co-commissioning: The Sutton Council toolkit for strategic commissioning (UK) The council developed a Commissioning Framework toolkit that evidenced the commitment to embed intelligent commissioning at all levels of the process. The document helped commissioners, at varying stages of the commissioning cycle. It guides for example, in supporting the ‘Analyse’ stage of the commissioning cycle, to understand the needs of the relevant population (Needs Assessments). Source Sutton Local Council (2020)

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Co-commissioning, understood in the light of the set of stages outlined by Murray (2009, 199), is the first initial strategic planning task required to transition to other functions throughout the commissioning cycle. Its primary underpinning rationale requires ‘knowledge of needs’ which implicitly shapes the outcomes prioritisation, and this acquired knowledge happens both inside the market place and outside of it, within the overall community: acquiring and deploying this knowledge requires strategic planning as practical reasoning in which learning features centrally (Bryson 2018)—a feature which also bridges to the next approach we suggest to explain co-commissioning through the lens of strategic management: the learning school of strategic management. Learning School —Putting Learning About the Place at the Heart of Cocommissioning. The learning school is an approach to strategic management which sees learning as crucial to the forming of strategy, and it places an emphasis on the influence that whoever can and does actually learn—partly irrespective of its formal location within the organisational hierarchy—is able to wield on strategic decisions. Commissioning can be seen as a process that public sector organisations use to plan, procure, deliver and evaluate services for residents (NCVO 2018), and co-commissioning as a tool to learn about public priorities. Within this emphasis on learning, commissioners may use a varied range of approaches to learn. From this perspective, ‘commissioning is a broader set of service delivery processes involving consultation, needs assessment, service planning and design’ (Macmillan 2010, 9). The power to unlock such connections resides with the commissioners and their skills to reach the market. Commissioners can reach appropriate decisions on outcomes by resorting to a variety of mechanisms to tap the voice of the community. The people (users of services, suppliers in contact with the services and society in the varied formal or informal roles) own the knowledge about the issues and can help with their clarifications. Hunter (2019, 11), in a report on public services transformation, talks about the shift to commissioning for outcomes and the learning curve of ‘deciding how to use the total resources available to achieve desired outcomes in the most efficient, effective, and sustainable way’. Learning about needs requires involving a diverse and broader spectrum of actors to define their requirements appropriately, as pertinent knowledge resides in the broader community. So, there is an element of ‘strategic leadership involved … to manage the process of strategic learning’ (Ferlie and Ongaro 2015, 32) and make the most appropriate decisions (which are informed by relevant people in place) adaptively over time, to reach a ‘good outcome’ at the end of the service delivery process. There are examples of varied formal and informal spaces for learning that have been developed to learn from the local communities. In Plymouth City Council’s commissioning, public commissioners developed specific forums for joint problem solving (e.g. Creative Solution Forum/Knowledge hub—a community platform (see https://khub.net—accessed February 2020) that aims to create more trust and connectivity among people, by sharing knowledge and learning from experiences across public service and beyond.

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Box 14.3 provides evidence about the receptivity by UK local councils in relation to the requirement to mobilise appropriate local knowledge in cocommissioning. Box 14.3 Cases of strategic learning for co-commissioning 1—Strategic Based Document Targets that Matter (Local Council, England, UK) In the wake of its transformation, a local council in London embraced a range of strategies to trigger processes of learning about citizens’ preferences and their manifest or more latent needs. It developed a strategic document that informs its corporate strategic goals, prepared in a collaborative, communityled and placed based vision with more than 2000 residents shaping it, though a consultative process. By developing such a strategic document, the local council brought into the mainstream specific targets—cross-cutting themes, in education, community engagement, housing, health and wellbeing, employment and environment—that the local council aims to address within a time frame of twenty years. It reports annually on the improvements achieved, thus supporting the development of learning processes with users. 2—Outcomes Framework for Children and Young People (Local Council in Hampshire, England, UK) Hampshire County Council developed the Children and Young People’s Plan 2019–2021, containing priority outcomes to be addressed in the fields of health and social care for children and young people. The key driver behind the development of the outcomes framework was to offer a better place to enjoy a good childhood for children and young people, including those who are vulnerable and disadvantaged. The plan focused on different theme-based outcomes that matter to the young, encompassing economic wellbeing, being healthy, being safe, being able to live a full life and make a positive contribution to society. Source Hampshire County Council (2020). https://documents.hants. gov.uk/childrens-services/CYPP.pdf. See also Montague et al. (2018), retrieved from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS01406736(18)32889-7/fulltext

Concluding Remarks Loeffler and Bovaird (2019, 242) ask ‘how can commissioners collaborate with service users and local communities within the commissioning cycle to improve public services and outcomes? In other words, how can co-production be built into the commissioning cycle to make it a co-commissioning process?’ and provide valuable guidelines underpinning a co-commissioning rationale, revolving around the consideration that public outcomes are not only achieved through commissioned public services but also directly through co-production with service users and local communities and behaviour change on the part of citizens. We would argue that part of the answer lies in the adoption of

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a strategic approach by commissioners, in the ways outlined in the previous section. For governmental decision-makers intent on making the most of the resources allocated, following up on the consequences of this consideration requires adopting a focus on public value (in line with the public value school of strategic management), an interactive approach to strategic planning—and to adopt strategic planning in the first instance (in line with Bryson’s approach to strategic planning for public organisations)—and, in the most classical last but not least, a learning attitude—something which is rarely enabled or facilitated by the circumstances in which public sector organisations have to operate. This highlights the significance of exploring the conditions under which learning can occur and combining it with an open and flexible approach to strategic planning. Crucially, learning does not happen only within the commissioning public sector organisation: a strategic plan to co-commissioning requires an open place-based platform for learning which can provide a bridge for collaborating organisations, individuals and communities wishing to learn. In this perspective, the role of political astuteness, as discussed by Hartley et al. (2019), is fundamental to recognise, call into existence and lead for public value within and across different publics which might have concomitant, but also competing values. In this regard, the process of learning may also enable us to put commissioning within the broader process of ‘place-shaping’, as an ‘overarching strategic framework which defines the community services required and how they should be delivered’ (CIPS 2010, 8), and to see co-commissioning as integral to strategically managed approaches to co-production.

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CHAPTER 15

Transforming Lives, Communities and Systems? Co-production Through Participatory Budgeting Oliver Escobar

Introduction: Participatory Budgeting as Co-production Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic innovation where citizens participate directly in making collective decisions about how to spend public money. This deceptively simple definition makes PB distinct from other forms of public participation for its focus on political renewal and socio-economic impact. PB’s potential and malleability have turned it into a global phenomenon. In the last 30 years, it has been adopted in thousands of towns, cities and regions in 70 countries, gaining support from governments, civil society and international organisations. There have been an estimated 11,690 cases worldwide, two-thirds in South America and Europe (Dias et al. 2019, 15–16). PB has only recently permeated the literature on co-production (e.g. Barbera et al. 2016; Brandsen et al. 2018). A co-production lens brings into relief a central aspect of PB, namely, its regenerative work at the intersection between civil society and the state. Bovaird and Loeffler (2012, 1121) define co-production as being about ‘professionals and citizens making better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes or improved efficiency’. PB illustrates how co-production can generate public value by linking citizen voice and action and by enabling collaboration (and at times productive contestation) between professionals and citizens across communities of place, practice, identity and interest. I use the term ‘citizen’ O. Escobar (B) University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_15

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in an expansive sense, rather than in the restrictive manner of legalistic definitions. By citizen, I mean people who inhabit the various physical or virtual communities where PB takes place. This includes migrants, refugees, children or prisoners, typically excluded in narrow definitions of citizenship. I use the term ‘professional’ also expansively to refer to practitioners working for institutions, networks, organisations and services across sectors. PB has developed into myriad models and approaches, thus encompassing modes of co-production spanning Bovaird and Loeffler’s (2013, 5) four categories: co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment. In PB, citizens decide how to allocate a budget to fund policies, services or projects (co-commissioning). But they may also be involved in creating or reconfiguring a service or initiative (co-design), in managing facilities or implementing a service or programme (co-delivery), and in the monitoring and governance of the implementation cycle (co-assessment). PB processes can thus combine several modes of co-production at different stages. PB spans both ‘user co-production’ and ‘community co-production’ (Loeffler and Bovaird 2016). Sometimes PB’s constituency is the users of a service, and sometimes PB has a broader governance remit, where the entire community shares decision-making power over various policy areas. In any case, PB is a quintessentially collective endeavour, which may help to rebalance, in research and practice, the ‘major gulf between current levels of collective co-production and individual co-production’ (Bovaird et al. 2015, 19). PB processes are diverse in scope, scale, ambition and impact, and while they can include various modes of co-production, this chapter focusses on co-commissioning because it underpins its transformative potential through the mobilisation of resources. In the more radical versions, PB seeks to tackle health, social, economic and political inequalities, achieve more efficient and responsive governance and produce redistributive decisions (Baiocchi and Ganuza 2017; Cabannes and Lipietz 2018; Wampler et al. 2018). Underpinned by participatory and deliberative ideals (Escobar 2017), the underlying theory of change is that PB processes can: • mobilise a range of values, perspectives and knowledges (e.g. local, experiential, emotional, professional, scientific) to work out needs, aspirations, trade-offs and priorities in a given context; • develop civic and official capacity to grapple with complexity (e.g. wicked issues), overcome silo-thinking, address urgent problems and enable long-term thinking and • contribute to develop a public sphere that promotes solidarity over selfinterest, public deliberation rather than just public opinion, and civic education and agency over public apathy.

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In doing so, the theory goes, PB enables well-informed decisions for collective action that can transform lives, communities and systems. Increased capacity for effective action should improve legitimacy and trust, which in turn sustain and deepen that capacity, thus generating a virtuous circle for democratic governance. Later sections will examine to what extent, and under which conditions, PB can live up to this theory of change. But these broad ambitions already suggest why PB has inspired so much hope and concern. This type of democratic innovation can challenge political, civic and administrative cultures because—again, in its more radical versions—it entails a reconfiguration of public governance that redefines the roles and relationships of citizens, public servants and politicians. This chapter provides an overview for new readers, drawing from key sources in the PB literature and my ongoing research and learning with PB communities of inquiry and practice. The next section defines PB and offers a historical account, before moving on to examples of how it works. This is then followed by a review of PB impacts and outcomes, leading to concluding reflections about the future.

What Is Participatory Budgeting? Concept, Origins and Global Diffusion Democratic innovations are ‘processes or institutions that are new to a policy issue, policy role, or level of governance, and developed to reimagine and deepen the role of citizens in governance processes by increasing opportunities for participation, deliberation and influence’ (Elstub and Escobar 2019, 11). The point of these new processes and institutions is the ‘democratisation of democracy through more flexible, collective and less hierarchical decisionmaking’ (Sintomer et al. 2016, 6). PB can thus be defined as a democratic innovation where citizens participate directly in making collective decisions to allocate public budgets (e.g. capital investment, service funds, grants). Unpacking this definition highlights what makes PB distinctive: • citizens participate directly—PB places citizens (framed as constituents, residents, service users, etc.) at the centre of co-production, in contrast to other forms of participation that prioritise intermediaries (e.g. organised civil society). PB therefore descends from direct forms of participatory democracy, rather than mediated forms of associational democracy (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2019, 78). Civil society organisations still play important roles in PB, but citizens are framed as political agents rather than as mere subjects of intermediation and representation. • making collective decisions —Unlike other forms of public engagement, PB participants are not just being consulted, but share in the power to make decisions. PB differs from aggregative models of participation by emphasising deliberative work and collective action. That is, PB

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is not about aggregating individual demands but about working out public priorities through a collective process of ideation, proposition, development, review, deliberation and vote. • to allocate public budgets —Many public engagement processes are symbolic or tokenistic, rather than substantial and consequential. PB’s distinct appeal is that it deals with actual investment, resources and budgets. It goes beyond promises that something may happen and entails commitment to explicitly allocate funds to make something happen. As shown later, these parameters are unevenly met across the world. The reader may also wonder, is this then a form of direct democracy, of delegated decision-making rather than co-production? Not quite; this is why the coproduction lens is useful as it puts the spotlight on the complex set of processes and collaborations developed through PB. PB is a form of co-production because co-commissioning takes place through interaction between citizens, public servants, civil society actors (e.g. activists, third sector professionals) and politicians at various stages of the process. For example, public servants may not vote in the final stage, but they may co-develop priorities and guidance for earlier stages; by the same token, third sector professionals may co-develop proposals and eventually co-deliver the implementation of PB decisions. PB thus offers a unique exemplar of co-production as distributed practice across a complex system of co-commissioning. The PB definition above distils basic normative and practical elements in an otherwise heterogenous field. PB conceptualisations are varied and contested due to the interplay between ideas, contexts and practices (Cabannes and Lipietz 2018; Dias et al. 2019). To understand this, we must track PB’s origins and diffusion. Accounts of the PB journey abound (e.g. Ganuza and Baiocchi 2019; Sintomer et al. 2016) and they start at the same time and place: Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1989. This large city was the experimental cradle for PB, which soon spread across municipalities in the country. The Workers Party, a social movement then morphing into a governing party, developed PB as part of a broader programme of democratic renewal and socio-economic justice after Brazil’s military dictatorship. Porto Alegre’s administration was the trailblazer in mobilising citizens, particularly from its poorest communities, to participate in decision-making over public budgets. This generated a complex system of participatory governance that evolved over time, including fiscal and administrative reforms to support these new co-commissioning processes. High levels of local government autonomy and fiscal powers were central in enabling PB to allocate hundreds of millions of dollars (Baiocchi 2005; Wampler 2007). In this original model (see Abers et al. 2018, 7–11), the PB annual cycle starts in open neighbourhood assemblies where, with support from community organisers, residents identify proposals for investment. Open assemblies also take place at regional level covering the entire city. Their role is to scrutinise the government’s implementation of decisions from the previous

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year and elect temporary delegates for 16 Regional Budget Forums. These forums work over months to define distributional criteria (e.g. using indexes of socio-economic exclusion), prioritise proposals coming from neighbourhood assemblies and categorise investment programmes by policy area (e.g. infrastructure, education, health). Over time, this geographic approach was complemented by 5 Thematic Budget Forums covering municipal-level policies, in order to foster solidarity across the city on issues affecting all inhabitants (e.g. transport, economic development). The final layer is the Municipal Budget Council, a deliberative body formed by civil society representatives elected for a year by the regional assemblies. It oversees the PB process, ratifies criteria for regional and thematic distribution and approves allocations to government departments. Public servants and other professionals, including the Mayor’s office and relevant agencies, provide expertise to cost proposals or assess feasibility and legal compliance. The result is an Investment Plan taken forward by the Mayor, as part of the full municipal budget, for scrutiny and ratification by elected politicians at the City Assembly. Implementation then follows, overlapping with annual PB cycles. Initially the focus was on capital investment (i.e. infrastructure), but it eventually extended to co-commissioning public services (Abers et al. 2018). Creating and sustaining this complex model of participatory governance was fraught with challenges and entailed ongoing development and reform. Nevertheless, PB is credited as a catalyst for urban transformation through development and redistribution in Porto Alegre, particularly in its first decade (de Sousa Santos 1998; Marquetti et al. 2012). I will review outcomes later, but there were six types of impacts as summarised by Abers et al. (2018, 11–12): direct and sustained inclusion of the poor and socially excluded in the governance of the city; breaking down clientelism and patronage through increased transparency; redistributing urban infrastructure and public services to under-served neighbourhoods; building and democratising civil society; developing new public administration capacity and advancing a radical form of democratic governance. For narrative purposes, PB’s diffusion can be roughly mapped onto three waves: national (1990s), international (2000s) and global (2010 onwards). In the 1990s, Porto Alegre inspired adaptations mainly across Brazil (Wampler 2007). In the second wave, PB spread to Argentina, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, alongside early adopters in Europe such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, France and the United Kingdom (Sintomer et al. 2016; Talpin 2011). The ‘tipping point’ was the first World Social Forum, hosted in 2001 in Porto Alegre to galvanise an international civil society counter-movement to the World Economic Forum held that year in Davos (Porto de Oliveira 2017, 129). The World Social Forum was a milestone in PB’s diffusion, particularly for the European trailblazers (Rocke 2014). Thousands of activists, public servants, politicians, researchers and social innovators brought back their learning about the Porto Alegre experience to their countries. New international connections, networks and communities of practice began to form.

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In parallel, PB caught the attention of international institutions, development agencies and NGOs, attracted by PB’s potential to increase participation, transparency and accountability in the allocation of resources. For example, UNICEF, the United Nations Development Programme and UN-Women funded PB programmes in South America and Africa (Porto de Oliveira 2017, 137); the World Bank has promoted PB through international development programmes; and the Open Government Partnership champions PB transnationally, with countries like Scotland making it central to its Action Plan (Escobar et al. 2018). Discursive work by these organisations and networks propelled PB as a ‘best practice for good governance’ (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2019). The Participatory Budgeting World Atlas includes 11,690 cases (Dias et al. 2019), showing global reach in the last decade. National PB legislation was passed in Peru, Dominican Republic, Kenya, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea and Poland (Wampler et al. 2018, 58). PB now goes beyond neighbourhoods, towns and cities, including also communities of interest and identity (e.g. Glasgow Disability Alliance 2018; Hayduk et al. 2017) as well as decision-making at regional and national level. For example, PB has been scaled-up in the regions of Lazio (Italy), Poitou-Charentes (France), Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Podlaskie Voivodeship (Poland) and the Federal District of Mexico, while Portugal is pioneering PB at national level (Allegretti and Copello 2018, 45). Capital cities are becoming key drivers. For instance, Taipei has recently institutionalised PB, training over 1000 public servants (Yu-ze Wan 2018, 225); in 2017, over 100,000 New York residents voted on US$40 million of capital funds (Goldfrank and Landes 2018, 164); and Madrid and Paris are allocating up to e100 million annually (Cabannes 2017, 181). Various political, economic and social factors set the backdrop for PB’s third wave, including the 2008 financial crash, the acceleration of socio-economic inequalities and the climate emergency. There is a growing gap between ‘the politically rich and the politically poor’ (Dalton 2017). These challenges, alongside the global democratic recession, are opening space for democratic innovations across the world (Escobar and Elstub 2019). It is striking that a radical innovation developed in the Global South by the experimentalist left has being adapted to such diverse contexts. Although progressive actors remain key champions, the PB journey is no longer exclusive to the left and includes centrist and centre-right parties, alongside international agencies and neoliberal institutions. Critical observers argue that PB started as a radical ‘political strategy’, but has travelled as a ‘neutral political device’ to improve governance and public trust (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2019, 78). In contrast, celebratory accounts note that PB has gone from a few experimental processes to myriad institutionalised programmes as ‘part of a social and political movement in defence of participatory democracy’ (Dias and Julio 2018, 19). Both perspectives may be right:

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PB has created a pluralistic field of co-production practices where competing approaches coexist, coalesce or collide.

How Does It Work? Stages, Logics and Dimensions in Participatory Budgeting Despite variations and exceptions, PB usually entails various stages: • Ideation and development —participants make proposals, which may be clustered and further co-developed with other participants, civil society professionals or public servants. • Review and deliberation—proposals are assessed and discussed according to pre-established criteria; for example, feasibility, legality, health and safety, environment, equalities, redistribution, funder’s priorities, etc. • Decision-making —proposals are refined through scrutiny and deliberation are then decided on, for instance through ranking, voting or consensus-building. • Implementation and oversight —successful proposals are implemented, sometimes co-delivered by public authorities, civil society organisations and community groups, with participants sometimes involved in co-assessment and oversight. These stages highlight key practices but are not linear. For example, deliberation can also take place when people are imagining or developing proposals, or overseeing the quality of implementation. Likewise, decision-making can permeate several stages, for example through the early assessment and filtering of proposals. PB’s diffusion is a story of translations rather than transferences, which has generated striking variation. Democratic innovations can rarely be transplanted across contexts without adaptation. Translating practices entails not only transposition but also transformation (Freeman 2009). For PB to become viable, legitimate and functional, democratic innovators must engage in a developmental process that intertwines civic, political and administrative capabilities, infrastructures and cultures. PB variations result from the interplay between travelling imaginaries (values, stories, ideas) and local idiosyncrasies (beliefs, traditions, systems). The spectrum of PB adaptations is vast, but there are models that show family resemblance. For example, the ‘community grant-making’ approach in hundreds of PB processes in the UK (see PB Partners 2016) usually entails the allocation of small community or service funds. In Scotland, early PB ranged from £750 to £200,000, with the average expenditure being £28,400 (Harkins et al. 2016, 4). In England, up to 2011, most processes were in the tens of thousands range, with exceptions like Tower Hamlets in London, which allocated £2.4 million in 2009 based on local authority-led proposals (DCLG 2011, 114).

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Community grant-making usually proceeds in three stages. First, there is an open call for proposals by community groups and civil society organisations. Second, the proposals are publicised, alongside invitations to attend events or participate online. Third, there may be community events where people review the projects, or engage in deliberation, before voting or ranking. Sometimes the entire process happens online, such as in Dundee Decides (Scotland), which in 2018 included 11,000 residents aged 11 or above, deciding over £1.2 million of the city’s capital budget through a digital platform (Escobar et al. 2018, 329). Developing a particular PB model can create path-dependency, but ambitions and arrangements can evolve over time. For example, after a decade of community grant-making, Scotland is transitioning towards mainstream public service budgets and potentially capital investment. This follows the agreement between the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities that PB will allocate at least 1% of local government budgets by 2021 (Escobar et al. 2018). The examples so far, from Brazil’s system of participatory governance to the UK’s community grant-making approach, illustrate wide-ranging variation. This hinders parsimonious typologies, despite notable exceptions (e.g. Sintomer et al. 2016, 47–57) and efforts to offer continental overviews (Dias et al. 2019; Dias 2018). Rather than trying to categorise such a heterogeneous field, this section explores variation through two heuristics: the logics that underpin PB approaches and the dimensions that help to interrogate PB cases. I will focus particularly on illustrating co-production through further examples. Firstly, following Cabannes and Lipietz (2018), there are three logics that usually underpin PB in practice: • Political : PB as an instrument to ‘radically democratise democracy and contribute to the building and deepening of a new polity’ (ibid.: 70). This logic was prominent in places like Seville (Spain), the first large city that adopted PB in Europe, adapting it from Porto Alegre. PB was developed to co-commission infrastructure, services and projects in neighbourhoods and across the city, including under-served communities and spending around e90 million between 2005 and 2009. The process enshrined decisions as binding once voted in open assemblies. The implementation of projects was overseen by commissions elected at the assemblies and working with public servants (ibid.: 72). • Good governance: PB as an instrument to ‘establish new societal priorities and construct new relationships between citizens and governments’ and to strengthen links in civil society and communities (ibid.: 70). This logic is illustrated in places like Dondo (Mozambique), which pioneered PB in Africa seeking to rebuild relationships between ‘citizens and the local state in the context of post-war reconstruction through an emphasis on good governance processes’ (ibid.: 72). Between 2007 and 2009,

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US$2.6 million were invested on improving living conditions through public works and services such as water supply, drainage canals, streetlighting and health centres in the poorest areas. Communities identified issues that could be addressed by local people and those that required coproduction with government. This informed the proposed budget and the level of co-delivery by citizens and public servants (ibid.: 73). • Technocratic: PB as an instrument to ‘improve financial efficiency and optimise often scarce public resources and service delivery’ (ibid.: 70). This logic drove most of the 274 processes developed in Germany since the early 2000s, particularly influenced by the New Public Management approach. The focus was on cutting costs or improving municipal revenue, thus prioritising managerial solutions over citizen participation (ibid.: 74). For example, the Solingen municipality responded to the Regional Government of Dusseldorf’s request for e45 million in savings by involving residents in prioritising cuts from an online menu prepared by officials. Around 3600 citizens commented and voted, which generated nearly e40 million in savings. Other cities in Germany replicated the approach since 2009 (ibid.: 75). Clearly, co-production principles and practices permeate the ‘political’ and ‘good governance’ logics, while they are lacking in the ‘technocratic’ approach. These logics are not mutually exclusive and may coexist, albeit uncomfortably, in PB shaped by competing agendas in particular contexts. Beyond these overarching logics, there are eight dimensions that help to analyse a PB process. Framing Framing analysis unravels how PB is presented by the convening organisations. What is organised in and out of the discursive frame? For example, participatory democracy and social justice were prominent frames in Porto Alegre, positing PB to tackle socio-economic disadvantage and reconfigure power relationships between citizens and institutions. In contrast, PB in England has often been framed by local authorities and third sector organisations as community engagement to address local issues and build trust (Rocke 2014). This frame has also been prevalent in Scotland until recent discourses intertwined community empowerment, public service reform and tackling inequalities (Escobar et al. 2018; cf. O’Hagan et al. 2019). From another angle, PB may be framed as an ad hoc process dependent on political will, or as a permanent institution legally grounded, as for example in Peru, South Korea and Poland (Dias and Julio 2018, 31). Frames set overall aspirations, expectations and boundaries, thus shaping constraints and affordances for co-production.

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Agenda-Setting The agenda for a PB process usually emerges at the intersection between the priorities of organisers and citizens. For example, a public authority can only open to PB those policies and services under its competence, and some may be excluded because they are statutory or ring-fenced. Likewise, a civil society organisation may seek to co-commission with money ear-marked by external funders. This was the case of the ‘Canny Wi’ Cash’ co-production process convened by the Edinburgh Council of Voluntary Organisations to allocate £56,000 from the programme Reshaping Care for Older People (Harkins and Escobar 2015, 16). In most PB processes, citizens and community groups make proposals, which increases their capacity to develop initiatives and respond to priorities. It can also foster commitment to PB and motivate people to participate and mobilise others. However, there are cases where the organisers provide a menu of options (e.g. Tower Hamlets), which limits the power of participants to shape PB priorities. It also hinders the creativity, energy and assets mobilised when citizens prepare proposals, and the skills and capacity developed through that process. Nonetheless, this model may ensure that decisions are readily implementable, as the funding body should have already considered feasibility. There are processes where co-production is actively supported at the agenda-setting stage. For example, in 2016 there were initially 3200 project proposals in Paris, which were filtered according to pre-established criteria by a municipal commission. Then, organisations, groups or residents proposing complementary projects were invited to co-design workshops in collaboration with public servants. This resulted in 219 larger and stronger proposals for public vote (Cabannes 2017, 189–190). Scope and Scale PB can be organised geographically (e.g. city, region) or thematically (e.g. environment, housing). Thematic variations still take place in a geographic area, but the budget is for a specific policy or service. For example, in the French region of Poitou-Charentes, 93 high schools take part in cocommissioning including thousands of students, teachers, professional services and parents allocating e10 million annually (Sintomer et al. 2016, 90–93). Some processes focus on a neighbourhood or community of place, as most cases in Scotland so far (Harkins et al. 2016). Others have broader scope and include municipal, regional or national levels. For example, since 2002, half of Portugal’s municipalities carry out PB, and since 2017 the national government has pioneered three country-wide PB processes, for the general population, young people and schools (Dias and Julio 2018, 22, 25). Multilevel PB has often been inspired by Brazilian experiences, and developed in European municipalities such as Morsang-sur-Orge, Cordoba and Seville (Talpin 2011). PB designed as a multilevel co-commissioning process

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promotes attention beyond local priorities and towards broader strategic considerations and solidarity. That is, making decisions that consider priorities beyond one’s own patch, thus grappling with trade-offs in allocating limited resources. This goal to overcome parochialism and foster solidarity explains much of PB’s global appeal (Sintomer et al. 2016, 3). In Seville, for example, city-wide cycling infrastructure co-commissioned through PB has particularly benefitted low-income residents, ‘dramatically improving their mobility and access to places of work and education’ (Cabannes and Lipietz 2018, 71). Inclusion Participatory processes face multiple barriers to citizen mobilisation because key resources (e.g. time, self-efficacy, wealth, education) are unequally distributed in society. Proclaiming that a process is open to everyone doesn’t mean that it is inclusive. Inclusion requires purposeful efforts to mobilise people by lowering participation barriers across communities of place, interest and identity (Lightbody 2017). PB organisers in Seville worked to include traditionally excluded groups such as low-income urban framers, young people and migrants (Cabannes and Lipietz 2018, 70–71). A much-praised feature of PB in Porto Alegre was that it mobilised some of the poorest and most excluded people in the city, including shanty-town residents (Baiocchi 2005). In their analysis of European cases, Sintomer et al. (2016, 190) note that gender representation is often better in PB than in traditional political arenas. In Seville for example, childcare facilities were available during PB assemblies, and there were programmes co-commissioned and co-delivered to help women access the labour market (ibid.). Glasgow City Council has recently completed PB pilots focussed on inclusion in both process and outcomes (Harkins 2019). The £1 million initiative included four deprived districts, each prioritising an area of disadvantage: child poverty, work and unemployment, ethnic minority experiences and young people. The process was co-designed and co-delivered by four citizens’ panels in collaboration with public and third sector partners. Deliberation A fundamental question in any participatory process is ‘what kind of citizen are citizens invited to be?’ Some processes invite people as spectators and consultees, while others invite them as deliberators and co-producers (Escobar 2017). PB usually entails the latter, but there are various possible designs. There are three approaches to participation in PB, namely aggregative, deliberative or combined. In the aggregative approach, participants express priorities by voting. Ranking is usually the preferred form of voting because it reduces the ‘popularity contest’ effect, where participants vote only for initiatives they know. Having to rank options incentivises learning about alternative proposals

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and priorities. The aggregative approach is characteristic of PB in community grant-making. In the deliberative approach, the emphasis is on discussing priorities, options and trade-offs. Participants learn about the issues and initiatives at stake and deliberate with other participants, proponents and stakeholders. This typically entails assemblies, forums or committees, where participants share evidence and reasons to justify their arguments and re-examine their views in the light of perspectives presented by others. Making decisions via deliberation entails building consensus, which can be difficult without a resolution mechanism such as voting—especially when the process involves large populations. Purely deliberative PB processes are thus unusual, with the notable exception of PB in Antwerp (Belgium) where decisions are currently made through consensus-building in sequenced forums (see https://www.demsoc. org/2019/02/28/antwerps-consensus-based-participatory-budget/). More common is to combine deliberation and voting, so that decisions are not just a reflection of public opinion (aggregative) but of public reasoning (deliberative). This combined approach can be found worldwide, but it’s not universal (Dias 2018; Harkins et al. 2016). Combined approaches enhance the democratic quality of PB by enabling exploration, discovery, learning and scrutiny, which in turn generates more robust, informed and considered decision-making. This guides current work by Fife Council (Scotland), where £22 million in transport services will be co-commissioned through PB designed for deliberative quality (see https://fif.communitychoices.scot/leg islation/processes/1/debate). It will comprise four stages: Discover, Dream, Design Together, Decide. In the first two, participants will review current public transport services and gather ideas and proposals through online and offline forums. The third stage will include a ‘deliberative mini-public’ (Escobar and Elstub 2017) to assess, develop and prioritise proposals. The final stage will entail a public vote on service designs, with changes to policy, spending or service delivery built into the mainstream budget cycle. Facilitation and Support PB typically mobilises expertise across public authorities, civil society organisations and communities. Depending on scale and governance context, various forms of knowledge must be brought into co-productive relationship: from local, experiential and professional perspectives, to scientific, technical and policy know-how. At its most ambitious, PB also requires expertise to work through, and possibly change, existing systems and cultures. Organising the process takes a varied skill-set, including project management and coordination, PR and communication, process design, IT, community organising and forum facilitation. When coordinators and facilitators belong to a large institution or service they can draw on organisational resources. Sometimes there are teams dedicated solely to PB, as in Seville, where the municipality employed five PB officers, or Porto Alegre, with a large team of official community

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organisers (Talpin 2011; Baiocchi 2005). In Paris, the permanent PB team includes nine staff based at the Vice-Mayor Office, with access to political, administrative and IT capacity; for example, around 300 civil servants have contributed to the feasibility study of proposals (Cabannes 2017, 184). In smaller processes, PB may be only a portion of the workload of inhouse facilitators, as it is typical in Scottish processes like Kirkcaldy Kanes or Leith Decides, delivered by neighbourhood planning officers and community workers (Harkins et al. 2016). This adds considerable pressure to an already stretched public and third sector workforce, thus undermining the sustainability of PB (O’Hagan et al. 2019). Sometimes capacity is multiplied by working in partnerships between public officials, third sector professionals and community volunteers. Glasgow City Council, for instance, is developing a partnership approach with stakeholder organisations and community networks (Harkins 2019). Often, in-house staff are trained and supported by external facilitators such as PB Partners in the UK (see https://pbpartners. org.uk). There are also cases, like Rome’s Municipio XI, where an independent non-profit organisation has responsibility for impartially facilitating the public forums (Talpin 2011). The question of how the process is facilitated and supported is crucial for effectiveness, legitimacy and fairness. For example, community organisers play an important role in mobilising people who are usually excluded. Other support may be needed during the development of proposals, so that less organised community groups are not disadvantaged compared to professionalised civil society organisations. Ongoing support may be also needed for people involved in implementing and monitoring successful proposals. Digitalisation PB is experimenting extensively with online platforms, mostly complementing but sometimes substituting offline processes. Building effective digital infrastructure can enable large-scale participation at key stages: crowdsourcing ideas, co-developing proposals, deliberating on options, prioritising and voting. In Iceland, since 2012, the Better Reykjavik online platform hosts the My Neighbourhood PB process, which allocates e3 million annually: citizens can make and discuss proposals, the City’s Construction Board analyses feasibility and costs, citizens vote online, and the City implements the projects—with 600 delivered by 2017 (see https://participedia.net/case/4225). Madrid Decides is the largest digital-only PB process, allocating e30 million for city-wide projects and e70 million across 21 local districts annually (Cabannes 2017, 185). The platform, which hosts other participatory processes besides PB, allows residents to submit, review and vote on policy proposals and community projects over a three-month period. There are access points at 26 Citizen Advice Offices for people without internet. The proposals are reviewed and costed by officials before the voting stage; 45,000 people

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participated in the first year and there are now over 400,000 registered users (see https://www.involve.org.uk/resources/case-studies/decide-madrid). Digital infrastructure is particularly important for regional and national PB. In the pioneering case of Portugal, since 2017, people can make proposals online or at face-to-face assemblies. Proposals are assessed by the relevant ministries before public voting through facilities such as ATMs or online (Dias and Julio 2018, 25). In Scotland, by 2018 there had been 50,000 people participating in online PB, including over 5000 young people via Young Scot’s platform to allocate £60,762 to youth projects in North Ayrshire (Escobar et al. 2018, 325). All the usual caveats about online participation and exclusion apply. Rumbul et al. (2018, 42) warn that the digital migration of processes may contribute to the ‘gentrification of PB’. Combining offline and online approaches seems thus prudent. Paris, the largest PB operation in Europe, combines online and physical voting, placing over 200 ballot boxes across the city—50% of them mobile across streets, public squares, schools and markets (Cabannes 2017, 189). Institutional Fit Where PB is a form of participatory governance embedded within institutional arrangements, it often requires administrative and fiscal reforms (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2019, 79). In contrast, where PB is conceived as ad hoc community engagement, the institutional fit is of lesser concern because the process is not seen as core to the democratic system. This is usually the case in community grant-making or PB by third sector organisations. The institutional fit comprises dimensions such as syncing PB with the overall budgeting cycle for the public authority in question. For example, in Rome’s Municipio XI the PB process starts in January with public assemblies electing delegates for each neighbourhood (Talpin 2011, 54–55). The second phase in February–May entails meetings by working groups to develop proposals across thematic areas. The third phase in June involves voting for priorities through a public assembly in each neighbourhood. Finally, prioritised proposals go to the Budget Office in October for integration in the annual Municipal Budget. The institutional fit has implications for the role of public servants, experts and politicians, who in some processes review the feasibility of proposals and deliberate with citizens or their delegates. Elected politicians sometimes help to mobilise communities, contribute to deliberative forums or connect PB decisions to institutional procedures. There are, however, frictions between democratic innovations in participatory governance and established institutions of representative democracy. For example, in Brazil and Spain many PB processes ceased due to changes of administration and lack of cross-party support (Dias and Julio 2018, 22; Abers et al. 2018). Party politics can override participatory politics and undermine emerging institutions like PB.

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Impacts and Outcomes of Participatory Budgeting This section illustrates why PB is credited with transforming lives, communities and systems, while also explaining impact disparities worldwide. Effective PB processes are driven by the principles of co-production articulated by Loeffler (2016, 323): citizens and communities have ‘capabilities and resources, not just needs’ and can ‘contribute significantly to services and outcomes’. Moreover, politicians and public servants ‘should work collaboratively with citizens and communities, rather than paternalistically’, and the focus should be on outcomes rather than just on ‘better or cheaper services’ (ibid.). At its best, PB can generate collective capacity to address health, social, economic and political inequalities. PB funding comes from a variety of sources, including public services, capital investment, partnership budgets, community revenue, philanthropic schemes, supra-national funds or development aid. PB impacts and outcomes must be assessed in proportion to investment; for example, community grantmaking is not comparable to mainstream budgets. Money is not everything in PB, but it is a catalyst that provides focus and incentives to mobilise assets and resources by all involved. Although PB cases are multiplying, the amount of investment is actually shrinking (Cabannes and Lipietz 2018; Cabannes 2015). In the early 2000s, some processes were investing up to US$ 400 per capita annually, whereas now even flagship cases like Cascais, Paris or Madrid barely reach US$ 40; investment has decreased from up to 60% of total budgets to less than 10% (Allegretti and Copello 2018, 45). The emancipatory impetus that inspired earlier models has often being lost in translation. Social justice approaches, for instance through redistributive criteria that prioritise marginalised communities, have been central to PB’s impact (Wampler et al. 2018; Baiocchi and Ganuza 2017). Deploying PB merely as a participatory device, rather than as a form of participatory governance, compromises its transformative potential. Key conditions for substantial PB impact include: public administration support, adequate resources and strong civil society (Wampler et al. 2018, 68). When factors align, PB can enable the co-production of public goods and outcomes: • Socio-economic goods . These include public infrastructure, services, policies, programmes and projects in a range of areas from health to education, transport, environment and economic development, generating outcomes in terms of personal and community well-being. • Democratic goods . These include civil society goods such as political equality, citizenship development and collective capabilities, as well as institutional goods such as transparency, efficiency and accountability, generating outcomes in terms of public trust, governance capacity and democratic renewal.

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This parsimonious distinction recognises that participatory governance is guided by prefigurative politics: it matters both what gets done and how it gets done. As with other forms of co-production, PB has an important developmental dimension: it is not just about getting things done, but about improving capacity to do things better. Of course, these dimensions are interrelated. For example, increasing transparency of public accounts can generate efficiencies that liberate funding for improving services; and increasing public understanding of budgets can enhance critical citizenship that helps to make better-informed decisions. PB’s global diffusion was partly motivated by the outcomes reported from Porto Alegre. Evaluations of that case are very positive, including multiple impacts resulting directly from co-commissioning by residents, public servants and civil society organisations. The first decade provides the following highlights (de Sousa Santos 1998; World Bank 2003; Baiocchi 2005; Marquetti et al. 2012): • Shifting priorities. PB reoriented public investment to the poorest communities and under-served areas in the city. Between 9 and 21% of the city’s capital budget was allocated via PB annually. Transparent criteria were applied to support redistributive justice. • Improving services. New housing for poor families increased, from 1,714 families in 1986–1988 to 28,862 in 1992–1995. The amount of schools and nurseries grew from 29 in 1988 to 86 in 2001, which enabled doubling the number of children in schooling. There was also higher expenditure on health, particularly on building health care facilities in the poorest areas. • Improving infrastructure. There were 30 km of new pavements in excluded neighbourhoods yearly, sewage systems reached almost full coverage and 98% of residents had running water by 2001, compared to 75% in 1988. • Improving governance. Inflated administrative costs were reduced, and so were levels of corruption, which had hindered progress for decades. Enhancing transparency helped to increase tax revenue by 50%. PB also improved relationships between residents and officials, and across administrative levels. • Improving citizen participation. The number of participants grew annually, up to 100,000, particularly from the most disadvantaged groups in the city. Women, ethnic minorities, and low income and education citizens tended to be overrepresented when compared to the city’s population. Beyond Porto Alegre, evidence across Brazil indicates a positive association between the existence of PB and social justice-inspired change, in particular tackling health and social inequalities (Gonçalves 2014). A longitudinal study spanning 20 years across 253 Brazilian cities shows that PB

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programmes are strongly associated with increases in health care and sanitation spending, decreases in infant mortality and increases in civil society capacity (Touchton and Wampler 2014). This connection strengthens dramatically when PB remains in place over time, enabling sustained investment in social policies (Gonçalves 2014; Touchton and Wampler 2014). At What Works Scotland we conducted a scoping review of PB evaluations to assess evidence of impact on health and wellbeing worldwide (Campbell et al. 2018). We found both positive and mixed results from studies of political, economic, health and social outcomes. Highlighting the patchy nature of the evidence available, we concluded that only in the case of Brazil it has been possible to establish systematic longitudinal research. A lack of evidence on impact is not necessarily evidence of a lack of impact, and positive assessments of PB abound, but the scarcity of systematic evaluations remains a pressing concern. Cabannes (2015) reviewed PB in 20 cities worldwide, small and large (e.g. Chengdu, China, 17 million inhabitants), covering 20,000 projects worth US$ 2 billion. Basic services such as water, sanitation, waste management, transport and electricity attracted half of the funding, while the rest went to infrastructure, economic development, amenities and health and education facilities (ibid.: 259–260). In some cities, PB created new social services, helped to increase tax revenue, mobilised community resources, optimised scarce funding and generated matching funds from other tiers of government and international agencies (ibid.: 266). Cabannes concludes that PB has significantly improved ‘basic service provision and management, with projects that are usually cheaper and better maintained because of community control and oversight’ (ibid.: 257). PB provides incentives to mobilise resources by all involved, which helps to build trust and capacity to act. In Dondo (Mozambique), co-commissioning through PB built confidence in communities and improved their relationship with public authorities and services, thus increasing capacity to collaborate on issues beyond PB, e.g. security, HIV/AIDS (Cabannes and Lipietz 2018, 73–74). In a similar vein, a survey of experiences in Russia found that PB helped to address direct needs, develop governance institutions, increase public trust in local authorities and change residents’ attitude to their role in local development (Shulga and Vagin 2018, 440). In their assessment of PB across Europe, Sintomer et al. (2016) observe that the overarching focus has been the modernisation of public services. They identify six trends, with varied incidence across cases: improved services, better responsiveness, problem-solving, devolution, joined-up-thinking and transparency (ibid.: 173–174). Despite exceptions, they found limited impact on social justice outcomes, due to factors such as lack of political will to make PB a redistributive instrument, and a focus on social outcomes through other arrangements between state and civil society (ibid.: 185–191). They also

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noted limited impact on political culture and the ‘democratisation of democracy’, despite successes in strengthening civil society and increasing citizen participation (ibid.: 203–206). Studies of the UK’s community grant-making model echo these findings. Rocke (2014, e-location 2067) argues that systemic impact has been limited, but there are positive local results: participant satisfaction, improved self-confidence in individuals and organisations, improved intergenerational understanding, increased volunteering and formation of community groups; better awareness of local councillors, increased confidence in service providers, and more community control over some resources. An evaluation of PB in England (DCLG 2011) indicates that PB can attract additional funds into deprived areas by offering an effective means of distributing resources, generating innovative projects and disrupting the status quo of top-down initiatives and services. PB is credited with opening up new communication channels between the public sector and communities, but sustained support depends on the successful co-delivery of projects. In Scotland, PB is currently framed as a key driver for improving public services, empowering communities and achieving better outcomes for disadvantaged populations (Escobar et al. 2018). However, the evidence so far tempers expectations (Harkins et al. 2016). O’Hagan et al. (2019) argue that PB has been more about transaction and transference than about transformation. That is, much PB activity has focussed on transactional relationships (demand-supply) between service providers and communities, and to some extent transference of decisions and resources, rather than a more transformational shift towards co-producing collective action and social justice outcomes. Nevertheless, some experiences in Europe offer new hope in that direction. The City of Paris made a strong commitment by earmarking e500 million Euros over 5 years, inspiring what seems to be a particularly creative and solidary process (see Cabannes 2017). In 2015, there were 5000 proposals, of which 1500 were deemed feasible and resulted in 8 Paris-wide projects and 180 at district level. These covered transport and mobility, environment, public spaces, culture and solidarity programmes for vulnerable groups (ibid.: 193). In 2016, the top voted priority by Parisians was ‘Solidarity with the Homeless’, a complex and innovative programme focussed on homeless people and migrants, including various projects to increase access to services and facilities, provide health kits and emergency accommodation and develop new housing solutions (ibid.: 195). All in all, PB is challenging and changing public administration in Paris, as multiple directorates must collaborate among themselves and with various communities of place, practice, interest and identity, in order to co-deliver expediently (ibid.: 201–202). But for all its promise, PB is not exempt from pitfalls and undesirable impacts. For example, much attention goes to early PB stages (ideation and decision) but its impact and sustainability depend chiefly on the implementation cycle that brings proposals to fruition. A key challenge, observed for

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instance in Italy, is that instead of becoming a stimulus for better administrative performance, PB can end up ‘dragged by the slowness and inertia of bureaucratic procedures’ while public trust is eroded (Allegretti and Copello 2018, 42). Public administrations are rarely built for participatory governance or coproduction and thus implementation problems are found in PB worldwide, including Porto Alegre (Cabannes 2015; Abers et al. 2018). There is also the risk that politicians hijack the process and, for instance, in Spain and Brazil party politics has undermined PB (Dias 2018; Sintomer et al. 2016). Furthermore, there have been notorious cases of clientelism and corruption in Mexico City (Rumbul et al. 2018, 22–25). It is easy to rekindle cynicism even among pioneers in democratic innovation. This has been the case in Peru, one of few countries that mandated PB for all subnational governments. In the early years, PB was the most successful aspect of decentralisation reforms, increasing citizen participation and directing resources ‘toward improving quality of life in Peru’s poorest neighbourhoods’ (McNulty 2018, 147). Fifteen years later that optimism has disappeared, with most PB becoming a formality lacking robust deliberation, expedient implementation and civic trust (ibid.: 148). There are measures that can help avoid these pitfalls and enhance PB’s effectiveness; for example, following Wampler et al. (2018, 65–70): • Social justice requirement; redistributive criteria for the overall funds and subsequent selection of projects, for example using indexes that map under-served communities • Incentivising inclusive participation; e.g. removing barriers, introducing positive action • Training public servants for technical challenges but also participatory approaches and culture change • Peer-to-peer learning between practitioners in public authorities and civil society • Strong organised civil society, effective in co-production as well as scrutiny and contestation • Binding decision-making rules • Transparency and monitoring for expedient implementation All in all, for PB to transform lives, communities and systems, democratic innovators must consider structural issues which may require fiscal reform, redistributive policies, and profound changes to governance and public services.

The Future of Participatory Budgeting PB is arguably the most widespread and shape-shifting democratic innovation of the last three decades. Its global spread has been enabled by conceptual and practical malleability, which allowed adaptation worldwide following disparate

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logics and with varied levels of impact. Its transformative potential has often been tempered by depolitisation, that is, by ‘rendering technical’ what were intended as ‘radical projects of political renewal’ (Newman 2014, 3301). As public authorities drive the institutionalisation of PB, civil society organisations have crucial responsibility as partners but also watchdogs. There is ‘greater likelihood that PB will evolve into a robust institution when citizens more actively demand their rights’ (Wampler et al. 2018, 52). PB illustrates the emergence of new interfaces between state and civil society where co-production practices are developing. It provides a liminal space for the renegotiation of meanings, values and practices, which can lead to struggles and contestations. This is to be expected, as models of participatory, deliberative and representative democracy try to coexist and coevolve (Escobar 2017). For all its emphasis on collaboration, effective co-production must also accommodate productive contestation, and PB provides a capacious arena. The future of PB depends on overcoming difficulties aligned with those that coproduction faces more broadly (Loeffler 2016, 332–333; Bovaird and Loeffler 2012). I conclude by reflecting on six overarching challenges. Cultural challenges. PB requires reshaping mindsets and ways of working so that participatory governance can take hold. This entails learning and commitment from public authorities, civil society organisations, elected representatives, community groups and citizens. New forms of facilitative leadership are also necessary—i.e. the ability to bring people together across divides to engage in collective problem-solving, deliberative decision-making and creative co-production. In many ways, this amounts to a countercultural movement to change political, civic and administrative systems that go back decades, if not centuries. Capacity challenges. PB requires skills including process design, communication, knowledge brokering, mediation and facilitation. It takes local and systemic knowledge and the know-how to build trust, negotiate competing agendas and create space for robust deliberation. PB must be supported by properly resourced and trained teams, including community organisers and deliberative practitioners. Inequalities faced at large in society—related to education, disabilities, resources, self-efficacy, responsibilities (work and care), etc.—often prevent people from taking part in participatory processes. The know-how of facilitators (Escobar 2019) is essential to minimise barriers to participation and support inclusion, which underpins the legitimacy and effectiveness of PB. Building digital infrastructure and capabilities is also instrumental to large-scale participation and deliberation. Political challenges . PB brings a new type of participatory politics that may clash with established dynamics and challenge the status quo of organised interests. It can also clash with electoral politics and it is difficult to build cross-party support to give PB a stable framework for long-term development. There are frictions between innovations in participatory governance and traditional representative institutions. PB is sometimes discontinued due to changes of government and party politics. Elected representatives have a

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crucial role not just within PB processes but in broader systemic reform and culture change. Political champions have been central in the PB story, but democratic innovators remain a rare breed among politicians. Legitimacy challenges . Any participatory process runs the risk of tokenism, that is, being deployed for symbolic reasons rather than substantial purposes. In the current financial context, PB may be used for public spending cuts, which can undermine its legitimacy. PB that fails to mobilise substantial resources and commitment will see a distraction from other initiatives, thus losing support from people who want to make a difference. Consequently, PB must be worth people’s time and contribution. The legitimacy and transformative potential of co-commissioning through PB depends greatly on two democratic dimensions: deliberative quality and social justice. Inclusive deliberation enables learning, scrutiny and problem-solving, which generates better-informed decisions, policies and services. In turn, a focus on solidarity and redistribution improves outcomes for citizens and communities. Sustainability challenges . PB requires sustainable funding, long-term commitment, ongoing learning and adaptation, and sometimes institutional reform. PB can take years to develop and bed in. Paris has illustrated remarkable commitment by earmarking e500 million for 2014–2020, providing precious stability for PB development. Co-commissioning through PB may entail changing arrangements in governance, procurement, budgeting and other administrative systems. At its most ambitious, it may also comprise broader fiscal reform. In the early years of PB, Brazil underwent wideranging taxation reform to increase revenues. Porto Alegre had substantial fiscal autonomy, generating almost 60% of its budget (Ganuza and Baiocchi 2012, 5–6). Yet, not even iconic cases like Porto Alegre have guaranteed sustainability. Since 2004, its impact dwindled due to changes in funding and government commitment, and failures in implementing decisions, resulting in steady decline until suspension in 2017 (Abers et al. 2018). Research challenges. The evidence base on PB is large, but it is skewed towards case studies, features few mixed methods approaches and lacks adequate datasets for longitudinal and systematic comparison worldwide (Campbell et al. 2018). Given the global proliferation of PB, the challenge over the next decade is to investigate the social and democratic goods generated in the medium and long term (e.g. most effective and sustainable approaches, impact on institutions and services, outcomes for citizens and communities). A stronger evidence base is crucial to inform democratic innovation and reform driven by public authorities and civil society, and evaluation should be an integral part of PB processes. There has been remarkable progress building PB networks of practice and inquiry around the world, including the crowdsourced platform Participedia (https://participedia.net), the LATINNO database (https://www.lat inno.net), the OIDP repository (https://oidp.net) and the new Global PB Hub (https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/globalpbhub), as well as resources like the PB World Atlas (Dias et al. 2019). I therefore conclude by

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inviting interested readers to go beyond this introductory overview. Experimenting with, and learning from, democratic innovations like PB will be central to reimagine the relationship between citizens and authorities. We need traditional institutions to be better and new institutions to be different. At stake is nothing less than setting the foundations for the governance of the future. Acknowledgements I thank Chris Harkins, Evelyn O’Donnell, Coryn Barclay, Fiona Garven, David Reilly, Kathleen Glazik, Richard Brunner, Jez Hall, Ernesto Ganuza and Giovanni Allegretti for their insights and collaboration. I am indebted to the PB Scotland Network, the PB Working Group, and practitioners across the UK and globally—the feedback loop between research and practice is strong in the PB field, which bodes well for democratic innovation. Finally, my research was supported by What Works Scotland and I thank all researchers and practitioners involved, and our funders: the Scottish Government and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant ES/M003922/1).

References Abers, R., Brandão, I., King, R. & Votto, D. 2018. Porto Alegre: Participatory Budgeting and the Challenge of Sustaining Transformative Change. World Resources Report Case Study. Washington, DC, World Resources Institute. Allegretti, G. & Copello, K. 2018. Winding Around Money. What’s New in PB and Which Windows of Opportunity are Being Opened? In: Dias, N. (ed.) Hope for Democracy: 30 Years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide. Faro, Portugal: Epopeia Records and Oficina. Baiocchi, G. 2005. Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press. Baiocchi, G. & Ganuza, E. 2017. Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press. Barbera, C., Sicilia, M. & Steccolini, I. 2016. The Participatory Budgeting as a Form of Co-production. In: Fugini, M., Bracci, E. & Sicilia, M. (eds.) Co-production in the Public Sector: Experiences and Challenges. Cham: Springer International. Bovaird, T. & Loeffler, E. 2012. From Engagement to Co- Production: The Contribution of Users and Communities to Outcomes and Public Value. Voluntas, 23, 1119–1138. Bovaird, T. & Loeffler, E. 2013. We’re All in This Together: Harnessing User and Community Co-production of Public Outcomes. Birmingham: Institute of Local Government Studies. Bovaird, T., Van Ryzin, G. G., Loeffler, E. & Parrado, S. 2015. Activating Citizens to Participate in Collective Co-production of Public Services. Journal of Social Policy, 44, 1–23. Brandsen, T., Steen, T. & Verschuere, B. (eds.) 2018. Co-production and Co-Creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services. New York and London, Routledge. Cabannes, Y. 2015. The Impact of Participatory Budgeting on Basic Services: Municipal Practices and Evidence from the Field. Environment & Urbanization, 27, 257–284.

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PART V

Co-design of Public Services and Outcomes

CHAPTER 16

Co-designing Healthcare Services with Patients Glenn Robert, Sara Donetto, and Oli Williams

Introduction While the foundational studies by Ostrom et al. (1973, 1978) highlighted the significance of citizens in the ‘co-delivery’ of public services and outcomes, their subsequent work further specified that citizens could also fulfil an important role as designers of such services (Ostrom 1996). Later conceptualisations have proposed ‘co-design’ as a specific category of activity within co-production processes (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013; Osborne et al. 2016; Brandsen et al. 2018). In this chapter we focus exclusively on co-design. We explore the origins and evolution of co-design practices as part of the wider field of design thinking before describing their contemporary application in our own field of research: improving healthcare services and health. To illustrate, we discuss the development, adoption, implementation and evaluation of a particular co-design approach—Experience-based Co-design (EBCD)— which we have extensive experience of using and appraising. We then reflect on the role of co-design within a context of growing attention to the potential value of co-production in the healthcare sector. By foregrounding co-design in this way, we explore what we would argue is a relatively neglected—perhaps taken for granted—element of co-production processes that warrants closer attention.

G. Robert (B) · S. Donetto · O. Williams King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_16

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A Brief History of Design Thinking and Co-design Stefanie Di Russo (2012) wittily observed, ‘One does not simply trace the history of design thinking’. Nonetheless, what follows is our brief—and inevitably partial—account of a complex web of influences and overlapping contributions which have shaped how design thinking and co-design have come to be conceptualised, practised and studied today. Participatory Design Novel ways of encouraging creativity in mechanical engineering in the 1950s (Arnold 1959) and new design methods applied in the same field in the 1960s (Archer 1965) together led to the idea of design thinking as an approach to creatively solving problems. However, the notion of design as a way of thinking is most commonly attributed to Herbert Simon (1969) who drew a contrast between critical thinking (as an analytic process of ‘breaking down’ ideas) and a design-centric mode of thinking (as a process of ‘building up’ ideas). In terms of involving users in the practical application of design thinking, the origins of what today is called co-design lie in the 1970s in the Scandinavian participatory design movement. As part of a radical movement striving for industrial democracy, a series of workplace technology projects were led by computer scientists and information systems design researchers— such as Kristen Nygaard and Pelle Ehn—who took the view that ‘the people destined to use the system [should] play a critical role in designing it’ (Schuler and Namioka 1993, xi). This series of projects came to be distinguished by ‘political commitments to societal concerns and relationships with participatory users and communities’ (Gregory 2003, 63). As such, participatory design was itself rooted in the work and thinking of educationalist Paulo Freire (1968), as well as being grounded methodologically in action research (Reason and Bradbury 2001). Interaction Design, Co-design and User-Centred Design From participatory design emerged a focus on interaction design (designing interactive digital products and systems) and then the first notions of codesign (initially, co-operative design, collaborative design) which began to place more emphasis on building capacity and capabilities within participants to enable them to benefit more widely from taking part in such processes. Later, Nigel Cross (1982, 7) sought to identify some of the intrinsic qualities of design thinking in ways which made it accessible to wider audiences, arguing that design ‘has its own distinct intellectual culture; its own designerly things to know, ways of knowing them, and ways of finding out about them’. Buchanan (1992) was the first to highlight a potential role for design thinking in helping to address seemingly intractable societal concerns (‘wicked problems’). Prior to this in 1991, the founding of design consultancy IDEO

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in the US marked the point when design thinking began to become a core part of many business strategies. However, this incorporation increasingly raised questions (which remain largely unresolved) as to the utility of popularised management versions. These often equated design thinking with, firstly, creativity (which is only part of designers’ work) and, secondly, a ‘toolbox’ (without necessarily transferring the knowledge and skills to apply specific methods) (Johansson-Sköldberg et al. 2013). Donald Norman’s work on user-centred design beginning in the 1980s (Norman and Draper 1986)—and later emotional design (Norman 2004)— was influential in highlighting the benefits of understanding user experience (rather than simply user testing). What became known as user-centred design was a more humanistic design approach involving the user throughout the development of a product or system. The methods and tools for this involvement have evolved over time and taken many forms, including building prototypes and mock-ups, role plays, design probes and design games (Holmlid 2009). This user-centred trend permeated the further broadening of where design skills could be applied at the beginning of the twenty-first century and included the emerging discipline of service design (see below), defined as a human-centred, creative and iterative approach to service innovation (Meroni and Sangiorgi 2011). Today, there are hundreds of descriptions of design and development processes (for an early compendium, see Dubberly 2004) and all of these methods, tools and frameworks seek to enable designers to understand and empathise with staff and users of systems, as well as to motivate users to participate and/or build on their capacities and willingness to share their lived experiences. One of the best-known ways of explaining and visualising the design process is the ‘Double Diamond’ (Design Council 2019) (Fig. 16.1). Originally developed by the British Design Council in 2004—and influenced by much earlier work on creative problem-solving mentioned above—it remains popular as a means to explain design to non-designers (Drew 2019), although it has been criticised for its simplified linear approach and what is sometimes viewed as an over-emphasis on ‘up front’ research. Throughout many of the developments outlined above, interest in participatory design or co-design within public service management research has come to be subsumed within broader considerations of co-production and cocreation, leading to a tendency for the unique characteristics of co-design to be neglected. We next focus on the still emergent discipline of service design, where the discourses and practices of co-design have particularly come to the fore in recent years, setting the scene for our subsequent discussion of how these have been applied in the healthcare context.

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Connecting the dots and building relationships between different citizens, stakeholders and partners.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES 1. Be People Centred 2. Communicate (Visually & Inclusively) 3. Collaborate & Co-Create 4. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

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Fig. 16.1 Design Council’s Framework for Innovation, 2019 (incorporating the Double Diamond) (© Design Council 2019)

The Emerging Practice (and Academic Discipline) of Service Design Service Design Practice Service design consultancies began to operate—first in London then in Scandinavia—at the turn of the century. Today, service design is an established human-centred design approach that places equal value on high quality customer experiences and efficient service delivery. While drawing on methods and tools from a wide range of disciplines (e.g. ethnography, information science and interaction design), its holistic perspective distinguishes it from previous design methodologies. Rather than focusing on the ‘end user’ (as in participatory and user-centred design), service design seeks to collaborate with all users of a service, ‘building relationships between stakeholders to open up communication for the exchange and development of value and knowledge’ (Di Russo 2012).

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Service Design as an Academic Discipline In parallel to this growth in practice, service design also began to attract academic interest. First introduced as an academic discipline in 1991 in Germany, it then slowly gathered momentum until in 2004 a formal international Service Design Network for service design academics and professionals coalesced around it. A project to map service design research in the United Kingdom found that this remained ‘a fragmented field but that academics from disparate service-related fields were beginning to connect and reframe their work’ (Sangiorgi et al. 2014, 4). As evidence of this, three recently published edited collections illustrate ongoing interest in the academic field of service design. One sought to identify key questions for both design practitioners and researchers across all service sectors (Sangiorgi and Prendiville 2017) and another to reflect on the state of the art of design work (more generally but encompassing service design) and research with a focus on health and healthcare issues (Tsekleves and Cooper 2017). The third, edited more recently by Pfannstiel and Rasche (2019) examines the nature of service design and service thinking in the specific context of healthcare (and hospital management). So, design thinking is nothing new; rather, it has been a topic of academic debate for at least the last 55 years. But both designers and design academics continue to ask questions pertinent to the context of public sector service design. These include how to: • scale up and embed the contribution of design thinking within larger systems; • identify the appropriate roles of designers and non-designers in addressing implementation challenges; • address a range of potential endpoints of co-design processes, and then evaluate impact robustly; and • ensure that the outcomes of applying co-design processes in public services promote equity. Naturally, these questions are also highly relevant to the contemporary—and specific—use of co-design approaches in the health and social care service sectors and it is to this context that we turn our attention next.

Co-design in Healthcare The development of co-design approaches in healthcare contexts is rooted in the increasing involvement of designers—and use of design approaches— within healthcare systems and organisations. Over the last 15 years several initiatives have been launched. Examples of good practice include:

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• Lab4Living was set up in 2007 and is a trans-disciplinary research group at Sheffield Hallam University comprising a collaborative community of researchers in design, healthcare and creative practice (Chamberlain et al. 2017; Lab4Living 2019). The group applies design skills and creative practices to identify and formulate questions, build understanding and create solutions. Co-design projects have included the development of wearables to make treatment more dignified for women undergoing radiotherapy for breast cancer and an intervention teaching people with spinal cord injury design thinking-skills to build self-efficacy and help them to better manage the impact of the condition. • The work of the Centre for Innovation at the Mayo Clinic (US) has been underpinned by design thinking since it was founded in 2008 and includes service designers among its staff. • The HELIX Centre is an interdisciplinary group of designers, technologists, clinicians and researchers launched in 2014, based at St Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College London. It uses human-centred design to develop clinically-evaluated digital solutions within broad themes of early detection, effective treatment and holistic care (HELIX Centre 2019). • The Design for Health & Wellbeing Lab is a collaboration between the Auckland District Health Board and Auckland City Hospital in New Zealand which, during the period 2013–2018, worked on a variety of hospital-based design projects across a range of design disciplines (Design for Health & Wellbeing Lab 2019). While these are all good examples of designer-led healthcare initiatives, a feature of much co-design work in the context of healthcare ‘Improvement Studies’ is that it has more limited—if any at all—input of professional designers. We discuss this type of approach through the example of EBCD as an interesting and complementary comparator. Experience-based Co-design and Improvement Studies Experience-based Co-design (EBCD) was initially developed and piloted in a Head & Neck Cancer service in an English acute hospital in 2004–2005 (Bate and Robert 2007). One of the main aims in developing the EBCD approach was to draw the attention of healthcare improvement policy makers and professionals to the burgeoning and exciting multidisciplinary field of interactive or ‘user centric design’ and to the whole concept of ‘co-designing for user experience’ (Bate and Robert 2007, 17). As argued over a decade ago by the originators of the approach: One rich, and as yet largely untapped, corpus of knowledge and ideas is the wider discipline of design sciences and the design professions, such as architecture, and computer, product and graphic design. Healthcare may sound a far cry from the worlds of product design and architecture, but one thing unites this

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extremely diverse group of professionals and gives them good reason for moving closer to each other: the common aim of making it ‘better’ for the user. And, more specifically, doing this by making the users integral to the design process itself and focusing on the experience ‘inside out’ of their moving through the service and interacting with its various parts. (Bate and Robert 2006, 4)

Whereas the examples given in the previous section are designer-led, EBCD is (typically but not always) conducted without the involvement of professionally trained designers. This raises interesting insights into the appropriate roles of designers and non-designers in such processes. As Macdonald (2017, 311) highlights, designers working in the healthcare setting could usually adopt one of several positions: working alone (as consultants), empowering non-designers to work alongside them or coaching non-designers to do the designing. But in EBCD, he argues ‘We can witness the logical conclusion of the desire for the democratisation of design … to the point where design is [as termed by Kimbell 2015] a ‘distributed social accomplishment’ (ibid.). EBCD also speaks to the challenges of how to scale up and evidence the contributions of design thinking. In the years following the initial pilot project, EBCD was adopted both in the UK and internationally as an approach to local quality improvement (QI) work in healthcare settings (Donetto et al. 2015; Robert et al. 2015). A 2015 report found that between 2005 and 2013 at least 59 EBCD projects had been implemented with at least a further 27 projects in the planning stage, not only in healthcare services in the UK but also in Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand (Donetto et al. 2015). More recent projects have been undertaken in a South Africa township (van Deventer et al. 2016) and the justice/healthcare system in the United States (Mendel et al. 2019). The dissemination of EBCD has been aided by the creation of a free-to-access, online toolkit incorporating several case studies. This was initially developed in 2011 through a collaboration between quality improvement practitioners and academics and is currently disseminated through a not-for-profit charity (Point of Care Foundation 2019). Additionally, due to its aims and approach, over time EBCD came to be seen and evaluated as a small part of what is now known as Improvement Studies: ‘an emerging field of study focused on the methods, theories and approaches that facilitate or hinder efforts to improve [healthcare] quality and the scientific study of these approaches’ (Health Foundation 2011). With reference to it being viewed as part of Improvement Studies, Macdonald refers to EBCD as a grand project and one that suggests designers need not necessarily be central to healthcare co-design (Siodmok 2014; Macdonald 2017). The debate around the role of professional designers in EBCD and other forms of co-design in healthcare remains an important and heated one. Designers argue that much can be lost from the process without professional design expertise particularly in relation to the appropriate use of creative and ideational methods (see Langley et al. 2018; Macdonald 2017; Thomson et al. 2015), echoing the critique of over-reliance on a ‘toolbox’.

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The issue is further complicated by the frequent use, in the evaluation of codesign efforts, of healthcare metrics that are not well-suited to identifying the contribution of designers (Prendiville 2019). The Approach and Methods Implementing EBCD in a specific healthcare service—usually over a 12-month period—comprises the following six stages (Robert et al. 2015) which relate to the core service design practices outlined by Burns et al. (2006) (i.e. understanding experiences from the user’s viewpoint, making things visible, managing risk through prototyping, trying things out and iterating ideas rapidly): • setting up the project • gathering staff experiences through observation and in-depth interviews • gathering patient and carer experiences through 12–15 filmed narrative based interviews • bringing staff, patients and carers together to share and understand their experiences of the service and then identify their shared priorities for improvement (prompted by an edited “trigger” film of patient narratives illustrating ‘touchpoints’ of service experience) • small co-design working groups where patients and staff work on the identified priorities (typically 4–6) over three or four months using design methods and tools to prototype, test and implement changes to services (which may include co-delivery) • celebration and review event Fundamental to the approach is a relentless focus on, first, the lived (and shared) experiences of patients, carers and healthcare staff and, second, the process of patients, carers and staff working together to co-design ways of improving their shared experiences. Fidelity and Adaptations As EBCD is implemented in disparate local contexts, adaptations to the approach may be appropriate and are increasingly common. Some of these changes are significant, however, and likely to limit the potential of the approach to have a positive impact (Donetto et al. 2015). However, other, carefully designed and purposeful adaptations have also been made, the most important of which is ‘accelerated’ EBCD (AEBCD). AEBCD was developed as a response to practitioner concerns that—while innovative and impactful— the EBCD process simply took too long, given resource constraints and scale of the service system. AEBCD essentially reduces the duration of the process by cutting out the filming of interviews in the original approach and relying

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instead on editing footage from a national archive of filmed interviews focusing on people’s experiences of their health-related conditions. Although lacking the local specificity of the original process, AEBCD still enables the sharing and highlighting of what is important to patients, carers and staff via the articulation of similarity and difference through comparison with the narratives from the archives—see Box 16.1. Box 16.1 Examples of service changes resulting from EBCD and AEBCD implementations (Locock et al. 2014, 44, as adapted from Donetto et al. 2015, 232) The ECBD and AECBD approaches were evaluated in two Intensive Care Units (ICU) and two lung cancer services (Locock et al. 2014) and proved readily acceptable to staff and patients. Using films of national rather than local narratives did not adversely affect local healthcare staff engagement (and may in some cases have made the process less threatening or challenging). The codesigned changes resulting from AEBCD implementation across four services were similar in nature to those in two previous EBCD projects (in lung and breast cancer services) against which they were compared but were achieved more quickly and at lower cost. We include details of the changes below to illustrate the types of improvements typically realised in EBCD and AEBCD projects. There were 28 activities across the two EBCD pathways compared to 48 across the four AEBCD examples and a similar distribution of activities, with more small-scale changes and process redesign within teams than wider process redesign between services and between organisations. In the EBCD pathways there were: 12 small-scale changes (e.g. reviewing and improving patient information; regular updates on waiting times in clinic); 12 process redesigns within teams (e.g. designated phlebotomist to reduce waiting time for blood tests); 2 process redesigns between services (e.g. physiotherapists reviewed timing to give patients advice about exercise; information flow from pre-assessment to post-surgery redesigned); and 2 process redesigns between organisations (e.g. link nurse scheme to improve cross-site working and visibility of test results). In AEBCD there were: 21 small-scale changes (e.g. sourcing clocks to aid patient orientation in ICU; more comfortable V-shaped pillows for post-op patients); 21 process redesigns within teams (e.g. new private room identified for receiving support after diagnosis; introducing mini ‘Schwartz rounds’); 5 process redesign between services activities (e.g. changed process for porters to remove waste avoiding ICU rest times; redesigned discharge summary with input from all professions); and 1 process redesign between organisations (improved cross-site information booklet for patients transferring to another hospital for surgery)

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Developing Complex Interventions EBCD was originally developed to improve local healthcare services via improving the experience of patients, carers and professionals within them (see, for example, the work of Bowen et al. [2013] in a medical outpatient service for older people). However, the approach has also been used to develop and test specific products and/or interventions (see examples in Box 16.2) and, increasingly, as part of the early stage of the Medical Research Council’s framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions (Craig et al. 2008). Box 16.2 Examples of developing and testing complex interventions Improving the experiences of patients with epidermolysis bullosa (Grocott et al. 2012) Epidermolysis bullosa (EB) is a rare inherited skin condition causing extensive, painful skin blistering and wounds. Adults have extensive chronic wounds that often cannot be covered by available shapes and sizes of dressing. During four workshops—and supported by a design consultant and garment manufacturer—patients, carers, and specialist nurses gave detailed accounts of their experiences and identified limitations of existing products regarding fit, stability, comfort, temperature and exudate. They came up with ideas about how dressings could be improved and used surrogates to test them in a way that did not undermine the integrity of patient experiences or the co-design process. This project led to the development and commercialisation of an innovative range of dressing retention garments, Skinnies, which improve patient experience and significantly reduce costs. The co-designed garments reduced the time taken to apply dressings; they also held the primary dressings in place and reduced the quantity of dressings used because fewer replacements were needed between dressing changes (Grocott et al. 2013). Supporting carers of outpatient cancer patients receiving chemotherapy (Tsianakas et al. 2015) The intervention—which became known as Take Care—was co-designed by health care professionals (HCPs) and carers from a cancer service in a large teaching hospital in England and the project steering group. The project followed the EBCD process. Take Care aimed to provide information and support to carers of people about to start a course of chemotherapy. It comprised a 19 minute supportive/educative DVD, an accompanying booklet and 1 hour protocol-guided group consultation, conducted by one of two chemotherapy nurses trained in group facilitation The consultation was provided prior to patients’ first cycle of treatment to groups of no more than five carers. During it, they watched the DVD and were provided opportunity to freely express concerns and ask questions. The DVD and booklet included information, advice and practical tips from carers and HCPs on topics including treatment side effects; impact of being a carer and dealing with emotions; and importance for carers of taking time out for themselves and accessing support. The booklet additionally provided hospital-specific information, including maps

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and contact numbers. The impact, acceptability and feasibility of this package was then evaluated in an exploratory randomised controlled trial. Carers in receipt of the Take Care intervention reported statistically significantly better understanding of symptoms and side effects and their information needs were more frequently met than carers in the control group. HCPs and carer focus groups confirmed the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention.

Although the application of the EBCD approach within the MRC Complex Interventions framework is becoming more common, the majority of EBCD projects continue to be undertaken to improve local services. EBCD was originally conceived as a process through which not only could specific service ‘touchpoints’ be improved but also the values of healthcare staff could be (re)shaped, by explicitly providing opportunities to rethink the fundamental basis on which services are provided and experienced. However, contemporary projects are often reported solely in terms of small-scale and heterogeneous changes to existing service processes and interactions which are relatively easy to observe (see Box 16.1); the impact of these are typically measured—if at all—through narrow metrics such as patient satisfaction surveys or standard QI tools. Any broader—potentially transformative—impacts on the mindsets and behaviours of service providers over time remain relatively unstudied. Radical changes to forms of service delivery are, similarly, rare.

Evaluating the Impact of Co-design Clarke et al. (2017) conducted a rapid evidence synthesis to identify and appraise reported outcomes of co-production and co-design as specific approaches to co-creating value at the service level within acute healthcare organisations. The authors found 11 studies that met their inclusion criteria: one study was the Tsianakas et al. (2015) feasibility randomised controlled trial mentioned in Box 16.2, three were process evaluations and seven used descriptive qualitative approaches. EBCD or variants of this approach were reported in 8 of the 11 included studies. Reported outcomes related to: • the value of patient and staff involvement; • the generation of ideas for changes to processes, practices and clinical environments; • tangible service changes and impacts on patient experiences. Only one study included cost analysis and none reported an economic evaluation. Nor did any studies assess the sustainability of any changes made. The authors concluded that there is a lack of rigorous evaluation in acute healthcare settings and that future studies should evaluate clinical and service outcomes,

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as well as the cost-effectiveness of these approaches relative to other forms of QI. A further evaluation of EBCD/AEBCD was conducted subsequent to the Clarke et al. (2017) review. It highlights some of the main challenges of healthcare co-design and issues related to conceptualisation of rigour in the evaluation of organisational improvement processes. The Collaborative Rehabilitation Environments in Acute STrokE (CREATE) study was carried out in two stroke units (acute and rehabilitation) in London and two in northern England in 2016–2018. This sought to evaluate the feasibility and impact of patients, carers and staff using EBCD to increase supervised and independent therapeutic patient activity in acute stroke units. A mixed-methods case comparison was used, comprising interviews, observations, behavioural mapping and self-report surveys (of patient-reported experience and outcome measures), pre- and post-implementation of EBCD; 130 staff, 76 stroke patients and 47 carers participated in the project. The findings are summarised in Box 16.3. Box 16.3 Summary of findings from CREATE (Jones et al. in press) Interviews and 365 hours of ethnographic observations identified that it was feasible to co-design and implement interventions to increase activity in what emerged as agreed priority areas: ‘Space’ (environment), ‘Activity’ and ‘Communication’. Patients and families reported positive benefits from participation in co-design and perceived they were equal and valued members. Staff perceived EBCD as a positive experience and a valuable improvement approach and they identified impacts of increased activity opportunities. Observations and interviews confirmed use of new social spaces and increased activity opportunities. Staff interactions, however, remained largely task-focused with limited focus on prompting or enabling patient activity. Behavioural mapping indicated a mixed pattern of activity (social, cognitive and physical) pre- and post-implementation of co-designed changes. Both pre- and post-EBCD cohorts reported impairment, dependency, emotional and social limitations consistent with national and international statistics. PostEBCD experience measures indicated that more respondents reported they had ‘enough things to do in their free time’. The structured time-limited EBCD process legitimised and supported co-design activity. All participants recognised that increased activity needed to be embedded in everyday routines and work in stroke units. Despite this, communication between staff and patients which supported activity was challenging to initiate and sustain.

The findings in Box 16.3 illustrate the challenges of embedding changes in behaviours, mindsets and values in complex systems, which (of course) apply as much to co-design as other approaches. The researchers themselves commented that the co-design ‘work’ was more creative and relational compared to usual staff-led—or externally driven—QI initiatives in stroke services. It also helped initiate new and ongoing engagement with local

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people and/or organisations for whom the hospitals were a key part of local communities. However, culture change on the wards remained challenging; interactions facilitating greater social exchange, cognitive activity, or practicing a physical exercise were still relatively uncommon at the project end (Jones et al. in press). This illustrates what Prendiville (2019, 359) describes as: … the difficulties faced by service designers in overcoming the siloed nature of healthcare services and the organisational changes needed to support service innovation, so that more transformative outcomes in health and social care can be achieved.

Evaluations of EBCD or adaptations of the approach are beginning—not unproblematically—to subscribe to the predominant hierarchy of evidence adopted by the Evidence-Based Medicine movement which sees experimental designs such as the randomised controlled trial (RCT) as providing ‘best evidence’ of effectiveness, often within the context of the MRC Complex Interventions framework. This is not without its challenges—including possible paradigmatic tensions—but offers a contrast to the evidence-base for co-production outside the healthcare sector which largely relies on single case studies and a focus on identifying influential factors, with little attention to outcomes (Voorberg et al. 2015; Loeffler and Bovaird 2016). However, privileging RCTs in this way may also mean that potentially wider impacts of EBCD are not appreciated (or even considered). A Return to the Roots of Participatory Design? Notwithstanding a discernible shift towards using and evaluating co-design within such hierarchies and frameworks, EBCD does continue to also be used in ways closer to the original values of the participatory design movement, i.e. as a transformative process grounded in democratising ideals. It is often these aspects of the EBCD process which engages and motivates participants: … people are drawn to a process that is sociable and interactive, novel, creative and stretching, that is worth doing, and they want to come together to work in a highly creative context, on something they believe is worth doing, and that will ultimately be an improvement for someone’s ‘life experience’ – a someone not unlike them, in a situation in which they may be, or may already have found themselves. This is why they give their time so freely and voluntarily, why the improvement/innovation process possesses such internal energy and drive, and why it mostly manages and takes care of itself, seemingly not requiring an organisational context or resources to continue and carry on. (Bate and Robert 2007, 190)

A particularly illustrative example of a transformative and democratising application of EBCD is the work carried out by an established co-production

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research network in a mental health hospital in London, which enabled professionals and services users to consider how lived experience might improve mental health services (Springham and Robert 2015). Previous QI interventions had little impact on a ward where problems between staff and service users were mounting and attracting high levels of formal service user and family complaints. In using EBCD to examine the issues and enable patients and staff to co-design solutions, members of the network had control of all aspects of the filmed interviews, including devising consent forms, data protection protocols and reaching agreement on the editing of the films. The ward—which was attracting higher complaints than its neighbouring wards up to the point of the first EBCD staff-user event (where the trigger films were first shown)—then experienced 23 continuous months without any formal complaints, which was a longer period than the two neighbouring wards (although they also experienced some reduction). The project showed that the pressures on ward staff and the quick turnover of patients meant many clinical procedures had become overly routinised, with negative effects on staff’s interactions with patients and patients’ morale as a result. By creating space for meaningful service user feedback, the co-design process triggered a virtuous cycle where a more balanced sense of staff effectiveness led to better interactions, increased staff morale and positive effects on patient care. Transformation Design It is worth acknowledging an apparent convergence between co-design and co-production in the healthcare sector. In 2004—coincidentally the same time at which EBCD was first piloted—the Design Council’s RED unit advocated an all-encompassing ‘co-creation’ approach to health services (Cottam and Leadbeater 2004). The unit tested such an approach in two projects: one focusing on a deprived community in the south-east of England and a second, in the north-west, working with patients and healthcare professionals to develop a new way of managing diabetes. The work was described as: … part of a wider movement towards open welfare, in which the traditional distinction between producer and consumer - or in the welfare field between the public services and the client or patient - is transformed into networks of self-acting citizens, with flexible degrees of involvement, supported in a range of ways by professionals. In other words, the user becomes a producer, and as such needs skills, tools, information, means of communication and technical support. (Murray et al. 2005)

This unit argued ‘for a new approach which we call co-creation since a new set of relationships between users, workers and professionals lies at its heart’ (Cottam and Leadbeater 2004, 1). While such outcomes are today seen as ‘arguably the aim of any co-design and co-production initiative’ (Dudau et al. 2019), in the design thinking space it is worth considering a distinction

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made by Glynos and Speed (2012) between ‘transformative’ and ‘additive’ forms of co-production. Co-production with an additive accent describes processes where service users and/or citizens contribute to producing change in, for example, a health service but without necessarily changing the way they or the ‘professionals’ involved are seen or see themselves or the fundamental structures through which the service is provided. Co-production with a transformative accent, in contrast, has the potential to alter the statuses and identities of those involved in the process and to create the possibility for more significant public service reform. Similarly, the type of ‘transformation design’ advocated by Cottam and Leadbeater seeks to leave behind not only the shape of a new solution, but the tools, skills and organisational capacity for ongoing change (Burns et al. 2006, 21). There is a tendency in public management scholarship to frame co-design as simply a sub-category of co-production. When this is done the relevance of the additive-transformative distinction to co-design work can become lost. Much co-design work in healthcare is undoubtedly of the additive form, and this is how it is not only mostly represented in conceptualisations of coproduction but also mostly practised and evaluated. This is an observation, not a criticism, given the positive—albeit largely additive—improvements that have resulted from this approach. However, it is also important not to forget the transformative potential of co-design. After all, the roots of contemporary codesign lay in the transformative ambitions of participatory design (for example, democratisation, reflective practice, learning and community development); as such, co-design can itself be a potential route to helping achieve the ambitions of more radical conceptualisations of co-production (Cahn 2000).

Co-designing Healthcare and Co-producing Health Given such differing rationales for co-design and recent proposals that the ‘next era’ of healthcare QI must better acknowledge and harness patient coproduction (Batalden 2018), we now reflect upon how co-design practices and discourses—which have ‘lost some ground to both co-production and value co-creation in public service management research’ (Dudau et al. 2019, 1588)—may be worth revisiting. In the ‘4Cos’ model of different types of co-production, Bovaird and Loeffler (2013: 5) initially represented ‘Co-design of services – e.g. user consultation, service design labs, customer journey mapping’ as an approach to co-production which was concerned with ‘bringing in the experience of users and their communities to the design of public services’ (ibid., 9). As an example, the authors offered how co-design can add value to council and public agency websites. We found this definition and these specific examples appear to limit the outcomes that co-design may achieve to those that are primarily additive. Rather, we have come to view EBCD as highly contingent and a ‘complex social intervention whose impacts and outcomes are difficult to evaluate and cannot be reduced solely to the design solutions it generates’

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(Donetto et al. 2015, 240). Consequently, we would argue for greater recognition of the potentially transformative impacts that can be achieved through co-design processes. In the absence of such a broader perspective, the role of co-design could be relegated to that of merely ‘fixing’ existing services rather than providing a means through which to co-produce new ones more fit for purpose. Interestingly, Loeffler and Bovaird (2016) later state that citizens ‘becoming involved in any part of the chain of co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment may go on to become involved in other aspects of democratic action’ (ibid., 1014), suggesting that the ‘4Cos’ conceptualisation does allow for consideration of the potential impact of approaches like EBCD on the democratisation of design (Björgvinsson et al. 2012) or of the plea by Cottam and colleagues (2004) for transformation design. We would argue that this later and more expansive conceptualisation and presentation of the potential contribution of co-design within contemporary co-production processes is closer in spirit to the analysis by Ostrom (1996, 1081) of the importance of the ‘intensive involvement of citizens in the initial design and continuing maintenance of these systems’ where ‘what citizens did made the efforts of public officials more efficacious and vice-versa’. So, how do we see co-design relating to co-production and co-creation (‘transformative design’)? Williams, O., Robert, G., et al. (2020) have proposed a heuristic which offers a way of, firstly, representing how concepts of participatory design, co-production and co-creation (and healthcare sectorspecific concepts such as ‘Patient and Public Involvement’ [PPI]) relate to one another and, secondly, considering each in terms of the additive/transformative distinction made by Glynos and Speed (2012). Examples of practice closest to the centre of Fig. 16.2 offer greater potential for transformative outcomes, whereas those closer to the outer edge represent those more likely to facilitate additive outcomes. Some examples are positioned beyond the boundaries of the transformative/additive circles to represent how commonplace box-ticking is in different domains (and how such tokenism serves to benefit neither transformative nor additive aims). We propose that reflecting upon contemporary practices and research studies of co-design in the health and healthcare context can offer important insight into the contribution of such approaches to co-production and value co-creation and their relevance and potential application in other sectors. These studies include—but are not to be limited to—exemplars of robust forms of quantitative and experimental evaluation (as called for by Dudau et al. 2019). An eye should always be kept on potential tensions around different evaluation paradigms, as well as overlapping interests in studying mechanisms of action (Palmer et al. 2018). The example of how EBCD has come to be viewed by many as an improvement methodology within the broader field of Improvement Studies also offers some potential clues as to how to ‘scale up’ co-production as an intervention in the healthcare sector (and perhaps other sectors), but with accompanying warnings to avoid co-optation and (too much) loss of fidelity. In response

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ADDITIVE Co-creating value(s) Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2000

Co-production (a social phenomenon) Ostrom, 1970s

Co-producing health (as next era QI intervention) Batalden, 2015-18

TRANSFORMATIVE PPI Community Health Councils, 1974

Participatory design Nygaard, 1970s (see Gregory, 2003)

‘Co-producing’ research

EBCD - a healthcare QI intervention

INVOLVE, 2017-18

Bate & Robert, 2004

Fig. 16.2 Additive and transformative co-production in the healthcare sector (Williams et al. 2020)

to ‘the broadness of the ‘co’ paradigm’ and ‘significant conceptual fuzziness’ (Dudau et al. 2019), we acknowledge the unhelpfulness of the phenomenon of ‘cobiquity’ (a conflation of the various ‘co’ words associated with participatory design—Williams, O., Sarre, S., et al. 2020), and consequently remain strong advocates for recognising in equal measure the unique—and importantly radical—features and potential of both co-design and co-production.

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CHAPTER 17

Co-design of Public Spaces with Local Communities Antoni Remesar

On Public Space, Urban Design, Citizenship and Urban Governance Public space is not a public service that any local administration can provide. It is a structural and structuring factor of city-making and the central subject of urban design. Building public space is one of the actions necessary to configure the ‘urbs’. Therefore, public space also involves some aspects of urban governance, insofar as public space is related to the production of the ‘civitas’ and the ‘polis’ (Prato 2017). The design of public space needs technical solutions but its materiality incorporates other dimensions that go beyond these technical issues. However, public space is subject to particular focus—while some scholars consider that ‘public space is the city’ (Borja and Muxí 2001, 8), others are announcing its ‘death’ (Sorkin 1992). Public space is so important that, even on the periphery of the great Latin American megacities, ‘the abandoned public physical space is the clearest expression of social and political retreat’ (Takano and Tokeshi 2007, 81). Moreover, public space was granted the status of a right, among the various rights to the city, by the Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights (IDHC 2009), which developed from the European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City, starting in 1998 with the ‘Barcelona Engagement’, prepared within the framework of the Barcelona Universal Forum of Cultures of, 2004, and finally approved at the Monterrey Forum in Mexico during 2007: A. Remesar (B) Polis Research Centre, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_17

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The right to public spaces, monumentality and attractive town-planning, which entails the right to an urban setting articulated by a system of public spaces and endowed with elements of monumentality that lend them visibility and identity incorporating a aesthetic dimension and a harmonious and sustainable urbanism. (IDHC 2009, 89–90)

This Declaration provides, in the wake of Declarations such as the Rio Declaration (1992), the right to participation, understood as the right of all persons and any communities to participate in the adoption and monitoring of public decisions in matters that concern them. As in other areas of urban governance, such as participatory budgets, citizen’s participation in the design of public space is not only necessary, but fundamental, because it becomes a key factor in city-making processes, especially when citizens move from reactive (making complaints) to proactive positions (making proposals, co-design). Urban design is more a knowledge and practical field than a discipline (Billimgham 1994, 35), since it assembles different disciplinary contributions to solve problems of the urban form through urban projects. Urban design assumes that city-making needs both abandoning top-down and technocratic approaches, and that city-making is a polyhedric reality; so, no single academic discipline can completely cover it, nor are the actors involved solely the public and/or private developers and their respective technical bodies (Capel 2013). The field of urban design is ‘is an interdisciplinary activity’ (Madanipour 2007, 19). But we argue that this field is mainly a ‘trans- actors/agents’ field’, because urban design is an arena for negotiation and compromise among the city’s various and diverse stakeholders. From the perspective of urban policies and governance, urban design must provide solutions to the city’s network structure of public spaces and its associated services, insofar as this network structure will enable people to exercise their right to equal access to goods and services. In this spirit, Art. 8 of the Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights states: ‘The right to local mobility and accessibility: all individuals have the right to orderly traffic that is respectful of the environment, and to move easily about the metropolitan city. All individuals with a disability have the right to their mobility and to the elimination of all architectural barriers’ (IDHC 2009). Furthermore, Art. 9 states ‘The right to the conversion of the marginal city into the city of citizenship, which entails the right of all individuals to inhabit quality urban areas, with a character of centrality’ (IDHC 2009, 90). Most appeals by citizens for improvement of public spaces refer to issues of access (traffic and its regulation, public transport, overcoming isolation, connection with other areas of the city), since poor physical access prevents citizens from exercising their basic rights to education and health, or accessing urban facilities for sports or daily shopping. For many years the modes of production of public space were based on technical criteria to which citizens could just react, giving rise to the critique by, among others, Jacobs (1961) and Lefebvre (1974). They showed that the physical form of public

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space was important to maintaining certain ways of life. Moreover, as Harvey (2012) points out, public space is a factor in some urban resistance against property speculation. The functional city destroyed traditional urban fabrics, taking an ‘anti-symbolic’ attitude, as was seen in thousands of housing estates in which ‘quality’ public space was not a reality until recent years. For decades, redeveloped city neighbourhoods and the new urban peripheries lacked even the minimum aesthetic quality; they also lacked the necessary monumentality (Bohigas 1985) to enhance the processes of social appropriation. Public space, from the perspective of urban design, needs symbolic solutions, as well as functionality. Some of these solutions are sensory and aesthetic (shapes, colours, textures, monuments and public art), which, following the scheme of Lynch (1960), can produce the emergence of ‘landmarks’, that in turn can promote the social appropriation of space. Moreover, the project of public space cannot be neutral with respect to remembrance, since the tectonic and morphological memorialisation of an area and the place’s social or civic remembrance are key issues for urban resilience. In a city there exist several scales of public space. Daily economic, commercial, labour and educational exchanges unfold in a territory larger than the administrative boundaries of the city. Cities are integrated into metropolitan areas, whether or not they are administratively recognised as such. On the other hand, cities are organised internally in districts with greater or lesser autonomy. The city is divided into areas of ‘identity’, the neighbourhoods—territories with clear boundaries and socially organised (Valera et al. 2010). Finally, there are areas which do not fit the previous categories, such as the CBD, the university areas or the few remaining industrial zones. These scales have effects on public space—its design and the possibilities for participation of citizens. There are important differences between designing a participatory process about public space at a metropolitan scale; setting up a consultation process about the re-design of an avenue within a district; or calling neighbours to discuss the provisional use of a vacant site. A problem arises when studying or assessing urban design operations, since this ‘field’ is built around different traditions operating in watertight compartments. There are several main streams, mirroring the diversity of positions, cultures and traditions regarding how to understand and how to proceed in city-making. Despite these differences, when the city becomes a global commodity, global real estate and public developers tend to create new ‘banal urbanized’ landscapes (Muñoz 2008), similar to each other, responding to the interests and tastes of the new transnational classes. The issue of citizen‘s participation in public space projects has been discussed since the 1960s and contemporary theories emphasise its importance in the constitution of citizenship. However, when implemented, citizen participation is usually framed from a ‘strategic planning’ outlook (Arantes 2002), involving the penetration of a private sector management culture within the public sector. Often, politicians’ priority is said to be searching for citizens’ ‘desires and expectations’, although the procedures involved have already

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helped to mask processes that Arnstein (1969) classifies as ‘tokenism’ and ‘placation’, if not indeed ‘manipulation’ and ‘therapy’. In any case, a politician’s priority is often to spend as little time as possible on these processes! These participation procedures are typically fast, colourful and, apparently, effective. Exercises in which citizens write their wishes on coloured notes and stick them on a wall or hang them on a clothes line are among the core instruments of civic participation, along with SWOT analyses. As the UN stated, civic participation is important in the progress towards greater sustainability (green design, renewable energies, air pollution reduction, urban agriculture, urban beekeeping, management of water and waste cycles, etc.). ‘Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level’ (United Nations 1992). In addition, and in parallel, local administration (increasingly weakened in the context of the decline of the Welfare State) needs to provide urban structures and services, deepening the redistribution of functions between the administration and so-called civil society. That is, urban governance needs to be designed ‘in terms of a co-management of public space, with roles clearly distributed among social organisations and local governments’ (Takano and Tokeshi 2007, 33), or as noted by Bovaird (2007, 856): This framework suggests the need to reconceptualize service provision as a process of social construction in which actors in self-organizing systems negotiate rules, norms, and institutional frameworks rather than taking the rules of the game as given.

Co-designing Public Space If we trust in civic participation in urban projects, involving many actors with different multilevel perspectives, we are enabling urban change. In this sense, co-design facilitates a mosaic of transformations when ‘transferring part of the decision-making to the population’ (Remesar and Pol 2000, 40). The essence of the co-design of public spaces is to bridge the gap between the various actors involved, politicians, professionals and neighbours (Gibson 1979; Hillier 2007), allowing active participation and commitment, regardless of the social, cultural or professional environment of the participants. ‘Public participation, particularly where a degree of power has been delegated to the public, implies a decentralised administration and a ‘bottom up’ planning or design style’ (Moughtin et al. 1999, 185–185)—that is, new forms of urban governance. In co-design, the designer becomes a facilitator of processes, as Gibson (1979) pointed out 40 years ago. Facilitation is one of the action principles of our team (Salas 2015). The facilitator brings together different stakeholders and helps users to participate, modify, experiment, create, produce and update the projects. This approach also promotes knowledge of people’s needs, preferences, desires, beliefs, origin, ideological and ethical values. When we embark

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on the organisation and development of a citizen participation process, our purpose is: • to empower a given community, understanding empowerment as the ‘the ability to take responsibility for’ and the ‘ability to solve’ a urban or social problem; and • to encourage people to get directly involved—that is, politically—in the decision-making process leading to an effective solution (Remesar et al. 2016). In this sense, it is necessary to assume that neither a research team nor a group of architects or artists, when facing a process of citizen participation, can alone achieve the goal of ‘transforming reality’, since this is always the implicit objective and the right of citizens. The political ability of people in a neighbourhood and their capability to negotiate with the local administration are the essential factors for urban transformation—in our case, the transformation of public space. For this reason, we need to ensure several objectives are met when designing an intervention, in an action-research process (Kindon et al. 2007): • To deliver the proper information. It is very important that the startup question to be addressed in the process be explicitly formulated by the neighbours themselves, so that it responds to a problem considered as their own. In this sense, it is essential to assess a priori the capacity of the neighbours to negotiate the a posteriori outcomes— in a roadmap, strategic action plan or, simply, as a specific material outcome—while assessing at which level of the participation ‘ladder’ the local administration is expecting to operate. • To set up a creative procedure, aiming to train and ‘qualify’ participants in the management of the ‘different languages’ used in urban design (terms, graphics, reading plans, modelling, analysis of experiences, etc.) and in visualising the aesthetic values of public spaces. That is why we design a process, normal in academic/professional practice based on project workshops, incorporating different phases leading up to the achievement of the formulation of a preliminary project or blueprint. The implementation of a creative co-design process, raises the problem of temporality. A methodology ensuring shared, agreed and negotiated outcomes does not allow short time scales. To train and ensure people have the necessary qualifications is to provide tools—conceptual, methodological, instrumental, linguistic, etc.,—for which significant time is usually needed, given that people in the neighbourhood are not full-time participants, but are investing their free time for a common purpose. Another inconvenience of this methodology is that it is impossible to work with large groups of people (a whole neighbourhood), which therefore leads to the next objective …

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• To design a strategy in order to broaden out both the process and the different proposals emerging to residents who do not directly participate in the workshops. Today, ICT can support dissemination of the participation process, while facilitating its traceability and assessing its transparency. [In our case, websites are available for the project Mapping La Mina and the projects in the neighbourhoods of Baró de Viver Bon Pastor (see: http://www.ub.edu/escult/index_projects. html)]. However, face-to-face actions remain fundamental and can take the form of civic forums, focus groups, project presentations, process and project exhibitions, explanatory brochures, referenda, etc. • To keep in mind the appropriate perspective. The process and its outcomes belong to neighbours and not to the facilitating team. Once the participatory process is completed and an Action Plan is produced, the role of the facilitation team should be reduced to ‘support’ people in the neighbourhood through the follow-up stages that lead to the co-production of the public space between them and the public administration. This support can be delivered through technical advice in order to facilitate the neighbours’ arguments. This co-design procedure should be considered a social innovation process: ‘Today social innovation is an anchor concept for research in creative arts, human organization, economic diversity, neighbourhood regeneration, regional renaissance, governance and other areas’ (MacCallum et al. 2009, 2).

Co-design Through Creative Civic Participation Our citizen participation projects have all taken place in the area of Barcelona, in the Besós River area (Fig. 17.1). Projects have included the role of a river as a fundamental binding mechanism in a city, and issues around public spaces in neighbourhoods like La Mina, Baró de Viver or Bon Pastor. This area has been under intense urban, industrial and social pressure since the 1950s, with high levels of immigration (originally from Spain, more recently from abroad). Socio-economic indicators show the resident population still suffering the effects of processes of exclusion, a legacy of the twentieth century. Similarly, standards of public space, public art and even housing do not equal those of the ‘wealthiest’ areas of Barcelona and neighbouring towns. However, this area is rich in civic associations (including sports, cultural, recreational, and solidarity activities, such as time or food banks, etc.) and its neighbourhood associations show a combative and resilient character. In our projects we work with ‘organized neighbours’ in neighbourhood associations, who, in general, act as go-betweens between the area and the local administration. These associations organise the participation of other neighbours in the different activities (workshops, civic forums, exhibitions, talks, demonstrations, walks, etc.). We start the processes, based

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Fig. 17.1 Besòs River. 1947 aerial photo with indication of the different points on which POLIS has developed participatory processes

on a ‘problem’ that residents consider relevant for the improvement of the neighbourhood, which facilitates the involvement of other residents. Our work started in 1997 with the project Social Uses for the Besòs River, completed in 1999. This participatory process was carried out at the request of the City Council of Sant Adrià de Besòs involving more than 60 neighbourhood and civic associations, trying to answer the question of whether the Besòs River could become a connecting axis between the two parts of the city. From this project, we will highlight an unusual and central outcome—it stopped the project of the Barcelona Regional Urban Agency that aimed to channel the last section of the river, which connected to the sea, to become a sports facility associated with the new Sant Adrià marina. Today, thanks to these neighbourhood actions, the regenerated Besòs River flows into a delta, and it welcomes different types of migratory birds (Remesar and Pol 2000). Subsequently, in San Adrià, within the framework of the European Urban II Programme, we also carried out the project Mapping La Mina (2001–2009), including several participatory processes with the neighbourhood and ethnic

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groups, working within the framework of the La Mina Consortium, a public body for local development. The central issue in the study was the improvement of the public space, both its condition and the uses and behaviours within it. In this process, creative workshops produced extensive documentation and many specific proposals were made; several exhibitions were organised to disseminate the project and some small improvements to the public space were achieved. Neighbourhoods managed to change the name of some streets, introducing some new names (especially women’s names). In 2008, ideas from the workshop Colours to step on led to the building of La Mina’s Rambla artistic pavement. Finally, a Neighbourhood Action Plan for Public Space was delivered. However, as a result of the economic crisis and the almost total dismantling of the La Mina Consortium, it was impossible to implement this Action Plan (Ricart 2009). In Baró de Viver (Barcelona), the process was split into two major phases. The first (2005–2009) was a co-design process between neighbourhood residents and our team, started at the request of a group of young people who posed the question: ‘How to change the image of our neighbourhood?’, particularly focusing on derelict public space in this peripheral neighbourhood. When the workshops came up with proposals, the young people had the idea of discussing them with the Neighbourhood Association. The Association valued collaborative effort and the process became intergenerational, transforming the concern about the ‘image’ of the neighbourhood into a series of topics around the improvement of public space and public facilities. Several creative workshops were carried out and in a District Fete residents publicly presented the workshops proposals—including an attractive model for a new civic square—which started a negotiation with the District. Finally, an agreement was reached between the Neighbourhood Association, the University and the District to start the second stage (2009–2013), focusing on the co-production of public space. Once the District accepted the Neighbourhood Action Plan, it was possible to jump from co-design—where residents acquired some technical skills related to technical language, the capability to read and understand plans, some knowledge of materials, etc., in addition to being most knowledgeable about the area and its needs—to the stage of co-commissioning (by the neighbourhood and the City Council), where the neighbourhood participated in the drafting of specifications for project tenders and even sat on the committees that chose the projects, and co-assessment through project monitoring committees. In 2011, the areas saw (1) the unveiling of the Baro’s Mural of Remembrance; (2) unveiling of the Monument to Low-Income Houses placed in the remodelled and redesigned Rambla. Subsequently, projects were commissioned through public tenders for the (3) Civic Centre building (2014); (4) for the new Civic Square (2015); and (5) for the skateboard track. Since 2015, the City Parks and Gardens service promoted (6) the neighbourhood’s ‘Urban Gardens ’. The ongoing construction of (7) the new football field is the last project arising from the neighbourhood Action Plan. We estimate that

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the City investment in public space and public facilities exceeds e15M in a neighbourhood of 3000 inhabitants (Padilla 2015; Salas 2015; Remesar et al. 2016).

Co-designing Public Space: Bon Pastor---Ongoing Case Study Bon Pastor emerged as a popular working-class neighbourhood in the early 1920s, following the location of some large industrial firms. At this time, part of the industrial district was within the boundary of Barcelona, while the small neighbourhoods of Bon Pastor lay within the neighbouring local authority. In 1929, due to pressing housing problems, Barcelona’s Municipal Housing Trust promoted a low-cost housing village in Bon Pastor (as well as in nearby Baró de Viver)—with more than 700 small single-family houses. Early in the 1940s, Barcelona annexed this land, and following the Provincial Plan (1945) and later the Regional Plan (1953), the area became both an industrial area (with three big industrial estates) and a residential development area, with several block housing projects and a growing, mostly immigrant population. However, this growth was characterised by spatial segregation (bad communications, wretched public space …) and economic and social segregation (poverty, lack of facilities, stigmatization ….). In 1968, the County Plan proposed replacement of the 1929 single-family homes by housing blocks. This started a long process of give-and-take between different local authorities and the neighbourhoods, ending (after a local referendum in 2000–2001) with a redevelopment plan, replacing the small houses by blocks to rehouse the residents. The projects undertaken in connection with the Barcelona Olympics (1992) had an impact on the area, since a section of the city’s beltway took part of the neighbourhood land. However, the only benefit the neighbourhood got this was that part of the beltway was covered with a large reinforced concrete slab, where there are now sports facilities, and a new pedestrian bridge to cross the Besòs River. Around 2000, two projects with a regional dimension put more pressure on the area. The first project, with a beneficial impact, was the environmental regeneration of the Besòs River (1999) which, over time, became a nice river park. The second project was the Sagrera Plan, an ambitious project linked to the High Speed Train in Barcelona—with a forecast investment of e2250M— involving the construction of a new central station; the coverage of the old railway yards with a new park (3.7 km long), several housing developments and the creation of a goods logistics area, in the so-called ‘Railway Triangle’. Today, the Sagrera corridor project is only partly finished, but includes an important commercial and residential development, La Maquinista, involving the construction of a large 250,000 sq.m. shopping mall and the construction of 829 homes. In 2014 the City Council of Barcelona agreed a modification

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of the General Plan to increase La Maquinista shopping area by 36,000 sq.m. and to build 588 new homes, a green area and a school. Although a large mall normally produces a commercial ‘desertification’ effect in its surroundings, La Maquinista is administratively integrated into Bon Pastor neighbourhood. This meant an increase of approximately 8% of residents in 2000, but this might reach 22–25%, if the 2014 plan is finally authorised. These new residents are different—socially, economically and culturally—from former residents, who came from lower economic and social groups. In addition, it has recently been reported that an international real estate investment group has purchased the old ‘Mercedes-Benz’ industrial estate (96,000 sq.m.), very close to La Maquinista. This new ‘urban regeneration operation’—as the developers call it—will involve the construction of residential and office buildings. We can foresee that more than 1000 new dwellings will be built, besides an indeterminate amount of office accommodation, so, in the next decade the residents in the area of La Maquinista might become 30–40% of the residents of Bon Pastor. Moreover, the creation of the logistics area in the Railway Triangle may bring a change in the economic structure of the district. Without wishing to be doomsayers, we are facing a serious and foreseeable problem of gentrification in the area. Meanwhile, a number of projects to improve the neighbourhood’s facilities have been undertaken within the framework of the District plans, the Neighbourhood Law (2004) of the Generalitat (the Catalunya Regional Government) and the City Neighbourhoods Plan (2016), including a new professional gardening school, a nursing home, a new market, important improvements in public transport (an Underground station in 2010, and new buses lines), new housing, and public space (paving, lighting, etc.) and a strategy to train and provide work for the unemployed in the area. This is the context in which we started the ongoing project Bon Pastor’s Remembrance: Let’s Do It, a co-design project through creative participation which focused on the neighbourhood’s civic, social and historic memories, with origins in the Baró de Viver Mural of Remembrance (2011). Sometime after the unveiling of the Baro’s Mural, the Bon Pastor Neighbourhood Association proposed to POLIS at the University the development of a similar project. We started the participatory process in 2014, organising a series of activities for all residents (digitalization of photographs, tours around the neighbourhood, panels, discussion forums…) followed by a series of workshops with a more limited number of participants (Fig. 17.2). This project pivots on two complementary axes. On the one hand, a participatory process aims to design a ‘spatial remembrance system’ marking the most relevant places to celebrate civic remembrance. On the other hand, MUHBA (the Museum of the History of Barcelona) aims to preserve one of the old village rows of houses and has started a project to host a museological space devoted to popular and workers’ housing. This is a co-design project between the City), the MUHBA and the Neighbourhood Association. The new facility also introduces aspects of co-management since some of its spaces will host

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Fig. 17.2 ‘The Pinya’. One of the 13 points of the remembrance spatial system in Bon Pastor

the Neighbourhood Documentation Archive, which will be partly be run by local people. (An initial model can be seen at http://www.ub.edu/escult/bonpas tor/index.html.) The two projects run in parallel but with many interrelationships between them. For instance, the museum space opens onto the newly remodelled and named ‘Vilabesos’ square, following a proposal from local people. For this public space, creative workshops suggested the raising of a monument to the victims of the 1937 Fascist bombings. The ideas for the preliminary design of this monument have been influenced, in location, scale and even in materials, by the existence of the museum space. In addition, one of the possible outcomes of the creative workshops is the creation of two welcome points. One, on the walls of the Besòs embankment, might express an idea such as ‘Bon Pastor, Barcelona’s Gateway’. The other welcome point should be located in the Underground rail station and would include one or several large screens broadcasting local information, and should refer in particular to the remembrance project. The management of this ‘welcome point’ would be located in the Neighbourhood Documentation Archive, so one of the tasks of the Archive would be to provide updated and dynamic information (part-financed by Barcelona Metropolitan Transport). After three years, several creative workshops, several neighbourhood forums and a couple of exhibitions, a Strategic Action Plan was finished in December 2017 and then discussed by neighbourhood residents. The Bon Pastor Remembrance: Let’s Do It preliminary project consists of 13 places in public spaces that demonstrate three key themes: (1) Our Industrial Past and Present, (2) Urban Aspects of our Neighbourhood and (3) Our Social Movements

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and Neighbourhood Struggle. These 13 points will have ‘panots’ embedded in their pavements. (‘Panots are hydraulic concrete slabs used in Barcelona for paving sidewalks and are a fundamental element in the creation of the image of the city [Esparza Lozano 2017]. Years ago, in the corners of the streets, ‘panots of letters’ were laid with street names.) Some of the ‘panots’ should incorporate a ‘QR code’ or a ‘Beacon’ device, allowing the introduction of ‘Augmented Reality’ (AR) in public spaces. The provision of information for AR would also be created from the Neighbourhood Documentation Archive. It is also proposed that a neighbourhood ‘trademark’ should be designed and embedded in the slabs, which would be important for local street signage. The participative workshops with local people took into account Barcelona City Council’s Integrated Sustainable Urban Development Strategy (ISUDS), co-financed by the European Cohesion Funds (European Comission 2013). Consequently, the workshops also developed two potential proposals in line with this strategy—a preliminary Green Walls and Colour Plan for the improvement of the walls and party walls, including a murals programme, as well as a strategy for productive green roofs. Bon Pastor is one of the few neighbourhoods in Barcelona not profiting from the Public Art policy of the City. Therefore, the neighbourhoods have proposed that some of these 13 remembrance points, can be symbolised by public art works, such as, for example, the monument to the victims of the 1937 Fascist bombing; a memorial to the White Centre—an old building, now demolished, in which was founded the ‘Heads of Household Association’, an embryo of the current Neighbourhood Association, within the framework of the Francoist Associations Law (1964); the welcome places along the Besòs River; and the memorial to the neighbourhood struggles to achieve the Underground station.

New Challenges: Co-design Faces the Co-production Stage The participatory processes we are describing refer to ‘city-making’ in a context in which there are specific ways of doing things and even specific ‘technical jargon’. For instance, in this context, ‘co-production’ could mean a stage in the process or a specific project of co-designing public spaces, with the aim of ‘giving form’ to public space. ‘The task we face as urban designers is to push this equation into its final state, from a spatial social process, to urban process, to the production of form’ (Cuthbert 2011, 89). In this way, co-design appears as a process organised in several stages that go from ‘idea’ to ‘materialization’. The ideation or vision stage concludes with a ‘preliminary project’, a first approximation to how public space can be shaped, in our case the Action Plan. However, to shape is not the same as ‘giving form’ to the space. In this sense, co-production with citizens is possible, as happened in Baró de Viver, but we have to take into account that formal, constructive and economic rationales prevail over the ‘ideational’ aspects. That is, in the early

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stages, local people can freely propose solutions for the public space that will then be (partially) included in the specifications of the projects to be tendered. However, once technicians begin formalisation of the projects, the solutions can change dramatically from what was originally expected. Sometimes, this can be positive, when appreciable improvements are introduced—but sometimes it is not, if technicians are responding exclusively to questions of ‘taste’ and ‘style’, which do not correspond to what local people wanted. Thus, it can happen, that the role of the neighbourhoods in co-production is stronger in ‘co-commissioning’ (since they are part of the monitoring commissions) than in ‘co-design’ (if the winning projects are not modified to fit in with neighbourhood wishes) (Fig. 17.3). In this way, technocracy can appear, with its minefields (of design, administrative procedures and economic rationality) and may prevail over political will and citizen aspirations. The Action Plan must address the technical arguments and also the tastes of the design staff; the technical arguments and legal constrictions of the contracting systems; the economic arguments, etc., in order to become a ‘Technical Memorandum’, that is, the document in which the objectives and specifications of the project appear, as well as the operating instructions (legal, project, economic), which will be a key element for the call for open competition and, later on, for public tenders. Other actors and agents may possibly appear—for example, some superordinate and ‘powerful’ political or technical bodies may consider the Action Plan not feasible as a Technical Memorandum. For instance, in early 2018, the District informed the stakeholders (Neighbours and POLIS) that the Bon Pastor Strategic Action Plan conflicted with other ongoing projects of various departments of the City Council, such as the PIC (Points of Cultural Interest) or the Programme of Memory’s explanatory plaques. Previously, the District had never given warning of these possible conflicts. Moreover, delivering the Action Plan coincided with a financial crisis in the City Council, which resulted Design of the public space . “Usual” Overall Process Stage 1

Stage 3

Stage 2 Project Draft

Project

There may be an open competition

There may be an open competition

There may be an open competition

Action Plan

Co-Design Stages

Technical Memorandum

Ideas

Technical and constructive details Economic forecast

Stage 4. Public Space Production Executive Project Layouts and Technical Report

Building Public Space Invitation to tender

co-delivery

co-assessment

Budgets and Cost Reports Environmental impact Report

Safety Report Participative Report

co-design & co-commissioning Co-Production Stages

Public space co-design . Creative Participatory Workshops

Fig. 17.3 Transition from ‘usual’ to participatory processes in public space co-design

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in cutting costs and even stopping investments. The District also alleged that the process had been delayed excessively, that the Action Plan does not include budgetary data, etc. The 2017 Bon Pastor Strategic Action Plan was intended to be an instrument to help in public space co-production—that is, an instrument for discussing and organising a new working process, with the new actors and/or agents, in order to agree a roadmap to operationalize the proposals. At this stage the main coordination responsibility belongs to the District. In addition to being an actor in the participatory process, the District is the sole agent for delivery. There is therefore an important difference between actors and agents. Actors are the different stakeholders participating in the process (Neighbourhoods, District, POLIS, etc.). On the other hand, the agents, in urban processes are the owners of the means of production; the landowners; the real estate developers and the construction companies, and, finally, public bodies, agents and arbiters at the same time in the process of production of urban space - agents as they carry out specific operations, which contribute to modelling the city, and arbitrators insofar as they intervene in conflicts between the other agents, helping to overcome their contradictions. (Capel 1974, 19)

More than a year after the presentation of the Action Plan, a working group to proceed to the next co-production stage has not been formally convened. There have been some conversations, there has been collaboration in presentations of the project, especially those related to the MUHBA’s space. However, there is no formal working plan. Under these circumstances, taking advantage of the renovation of one urban square, neighbourhood pressures forced the District to agree to the construction of one of the 13 Remembrance points—an action that in Arnstein’s terms, can be identified with ‘placation’. Although the overall process has not been formally blocked, the District is starting to display the signs of ‘wait-and-see’ tactics. This tactic is one of the principal reasons for the recurrent complaints from the neighbourhood, because they know very well this is the way projects are typically stalled, especially when a new electoral cycle approaches (namely, municipal elections in May 2019) and they glimpse the possibility that ‘we are going to have to start over again’.

Conclusions from This Case In the Baró de Viver project, we noted that practically the entire Action Plan was achieved through a co-production process. In Bon Pastor we still don’t know if the project will go forward—it depends on the election results and whether the government team will continue to take a lead, something that also affects the MUHBA museum space project. This situation illustrates the

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mismatch between the timing of the participation process and that of political cycles. If urban governance ‘is the process by which governments (local, regional and national) and stakeholders collectively decide how to plan, finance and manage urban areas ’ (Avis 2016, 1) we can argue that something does not work properly when the processes of co-production of public space are based on a fundamental asymmetry between actors and agents that prevents ‘an equal and reciprocal relationship’ (Boyle and Harris 2009). It is important that ‘agents-stakeholders’—in our case the District, in other cases it could be a developer—show ‘political generosity’, in order to overcome the asymmetry between actors and agents, placing ‘more trust in decisions made by users and communities ’ (Bovaird 2007, 856). In short, these processes not only have to overcome the technical gaps, but what is more important, to bridge the political gaps—including those related to timing - entailed in decision-making processes. From our perspective, creative co-design of public spaces is a precondition to co-production. As a collective and active reflective process on the part of proactive citizens, co-design can be considered a social innovation process aiming not just to shape, but also to give form to citizens’ conception of public space. However, co-designing public space is only one aspect of co-producing it. If we understand co-production as the complex technical-legal-economic process, involving new actors and possibly new agents, with the aim of getting the outcome of a built public space, we have to admit, that co-design of the neighbourhood Action Plan (the preliminary project), if approved, blends into two new processes, those of co-commissioning and co-delivery, in which ‘power’ must be given to citizens, involving people both in decision-making and in the process of delivery, as a foundational aspect of democratic urban governance. If the neighbourhood Action Plan does not move to the stage of cocommissioning and co-delivery, frustrations and reactive attitudes will emerge. Local people have invested their imagination and spent their free time in a task which has involved them in learning about technical issues and becoming familiar with urban design ideas, such as ‘remembrance’, ‘green area’, ‘welcome sign’, etc. So, to involve neighbourhood actors—workshop attendees and residents participating in civic forums—in participatory processes which result in the co-production of public space, including co-design, cocommissioning, co-delivery and co-assessment - we must ensure they are not driven back into ‘reactive’ attitudes and positions, which would jeopardise public participation or turn it into mere manipulation. Acknowledgements Work developed within the framework of the projects AGAUR 2017 SGR 1125 (CRIT), HAR2017-88672-R (Public space, creative participation, civic memory) and agreement Neighbourhood-District of Sant Andreu-University. With thanks to the students of the Masters in Urban Design, Universitat de Barcelona, for their involvement in the project Urban Cohesion in Baró de Viver and Bon Pastor.

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References Arantes, O. (2002). Uma estratégia fatal. A cultura nas novas gestões urbanas. In Arantes, O., Vainer, C., & Maricato, E. (Eds.), A cidade do pensamento único. Desmanchando consensos. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes. Arnstein, Sherry R. (1969). A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Planning Association 35, 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/019443669089 77225. Avis, W.R. (2016). Urban Governance (Topic Guide). GSDRC, Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Billimgham, J. (Ed.) (1994). Urban Design Source Book 1994. London: Urban Design Group. Bohigas, Oriol. (1985). Reconstrucció de Barcelona. Barcelona: Edicions 62. Borja, J., & Muxí, Z. (2001). L’espai públic: ciutat i ciutadanía. Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona. Bovaird, T. (2007). Beyond Engagement and Participation: User and Community Coproduction of Public Services. Public Administration Review 67, 846–860. Boyle, D., & Harris, M. (2009). The Challenge of Co-production: How Equal Partnerships Between Professionals and the Public Are Crucial to Improving Public Services. Resource Document. NEF - NEFTA. https://media.nesta.org.uk/docume nts/the_challenge_of_co-production.pdf. Accessed 20 September 2019. Capel, H. (1974). Agentes y estrategias en la producción del espacio urbano español. Revista de geografia [en línia] 8, 19–56. http://raco.cat/index.php/RevistaGeogr afia/article/view/45880/56672. Accessed 13 September 2016. Capel, H. (2013). La Morfología de las Ciudades. Tomo III. Agentes Urbanos y Mercado Inmobiliario. Barcelona: Ediciones de Serbal. Cuthbert, A. (2011). Urban Design and Spatial Political Economy. In Banerjee, T. & Loukaitou-Sideris, A. (Ed.), Companion to Urban Design (pp. 84–96). London: Routledge/New York: Taylor & Francis Group. Esparza Lozano, D. (2017). Barcelona a ras de suelo. Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona Comunicación Activa/ Ciudad. European Comission. (2013). Integrated Sustainable Urban Development. https:// ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/…/urban_en.pdf. Accessed 25 May 2019. Gibson, T. (1979). People Power: Community and Work Groups in Action. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso. Hillier, B. (2007). Cities as Movement Economies. In Carmona, M. & Tiesdell, S. (Eds.), Urban Design Reader (pp. 245–262). London: Architectural Press. IDHC. (2009). Declaració universal de drets humans emergents | declaración universal de derechos humanos emergentes I universal declaration of emerging human rights | declaration universelle des droits de’l homme émergents. Barcelona: Institut de Drets Humans de Catalunya. http://www.idhc.org. Accessed 15 May 2019. Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Kindon, S., Pain, R., & Kesby, M. (2007). Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place. London: Routledge. Lefebvre, H. (1974). La production de l’espace, 4th edition, 2000. Paris: Anthropos.

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Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambirdge (Mass): The Technology Press & Harvard University Press. MacCallum, D., Moulaert, F., Hillier, J., & Vicari Haddock, S. (2009). Social Innovation and Territorial Development. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate. Madanipour, A. (2007). Designing the City of Reason. Foundations and Frameworks. London & New York: Routledge. Moughtin, C., Cuesta, R., Sarris, C., & Signoretta, P. (1999). Urban Design. Methods and Techniques. Oxford: Architectural Press. Muñoz, F. (2008). Urbanalización. Paisajes Comunes, Lugares Globales. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Padilla, S. (2015). Producción de Espacio Público [X] Participación Ciudadana. El proyecto de espacio público resultado de procesos de participación ciudadana. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. http://tdx.cat/handle/10803/309288. Accessed 2 April 2019. Prato, G.B. (2017). Rethinking the City as Urban Community: Views from South Europe. In Pardo, I. & Prato, G.B. (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography (pp. 53–69). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Remesar, A., & Pol, E. (2000). Civic Participation Workshops in Sant Adrià de Besòs: A Creative Methodology. In Butler, J. & Bennet, S. (Eds.), Locality, Regeneration & Diverscities (pp. 153–158). Bristol: Intellect. Remesar, A., Salas, X., & Vidal, T. (2016). Urban Governance and Creative Participation in Public Space and Public Art. In Remesar, A. (Ed.), The Art of Urban Design in Urban Regeneration (pp. 112–156). Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona. Ricart, N. (2009). Cartografies de La Mina: Art, espai públic, participació ciutadana. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. http://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/1549. Accessed 2 April 2019. Salas, X. (2015). L’artista com a facilitador en els processos de participació ciutadana: el cas Baró de Viver a Barcelona. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. http://hdl. handle.net/10803/308505. Accessed 2 April 2019. Sorkin, M. (Ed.) (1992). Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. Los Angeles: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Takano, G., & Tokeshi, J. (2007). Espacio Público en la ciudad popular: Reflexiones y experiencias desde el Sur. Lima: desco Centro de Estudios y Promoción del Desarollo. UNDP. (2014). Governance for Sustainable Development: Integrating Governance in the Post-2015 Development Framework. New York: United Nations Development Programme. United Nations. (1992). United Nations Rio Declaration (Principle 10). https:// www.unenvironment.org/civil-society-engagement/partnerships/principle-10. Accessed 12 September 2019. Valera, S., Vidal, T., & Carro, D. (2010). Perceived Insecurity in the Public Space: Personal, Social and Environmental Variables. Quality and Quantity 44, 303–314. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-008-9200-0.

CHAPTER 18

Co-designing Neighbourhood-Level Social Improvement and Innovation Jacob Torfing, Elizabeth Toft Kristjansen, and Eva Sørensen

Introduction The idea that a broad range of public and private actors with relevant assets such as experience, knowledge, ideas, energy, elbow grease and financial means may come together to pool or exchange their resources in joint efforts to coproduce effective—perhaps even innovative—solutions to common problems and challenges is by no means new. Since the early 1970s, the Ostroms and their colleagues at Bloomington, Indiana, have repeatedly argued that actors facing a common problem may collaborate to produce and deliver public goods, thus giving rise to new pluricentric forms of governance that break with the classical forms of hierarchical and market governance (Ostrom and Ostrom 1971; Ostrom 1973, 1996; Ostrom and Whitaker 1973; Parks et al. 1981). After the initial academic embrace of co-production in the wake of Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990), for which Eleanor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, interest seemed to wane. It picked up again in the new millennium, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis, which caught the public sector in a crossfire between scarce public resources and growing demands among citizens for public services and societal problem-solving. This pickle rekindled the interest in co-production among

J. Torfing (B) · E. T. Kristjansen · E. Sørensen Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] Roskilde School of Governance, Roskilde, Denmark © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_18

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both academics (Alford 2008; Pestoff 2012; Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Brandsen et al. 2018) and practitioners (NESTA 2009; US Government 2009; OECD 2011; European Union 2018). Co-production gained increasing popularity because it sought to make use of the manifold resources of users, citizens, voluntary organisations, community groups and private firms. While initially linked to service production (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 431), researchers promptly expanded the co-production concept in terms of co-commissioning, co-design, co-management, co-delivery and co-assessment (Brandsen and Pestoff 2006; Bovaird and Loeffler 2013). Osborne and Strokosch (2013) broadened the concept to include citizen participation in strategic planning and the collaborative innovation of public solutions. This concept-stretching paved the way for a distinction between the ‘coproduction’ of more or less pre-defined public services and the ‘co-creation’ of more or less innovative public value outcomes (Torfing et al. 2019). Co-creation is not merely taking place between cash-strapped public organisations and relevant, resource-carrying private actors. It also takes place at the neighbourhood level, where it is initiated and orchestrated by social entrepreneurs and civil society organisations working to improve existing solutions or generating new and smarter ones in response to local needs (Bovaird 2007; Meijer 2011; Bolívar and Pedro 2018). Research investigating cocreation in local neighbourhoods remains in its infancy. In order to further broaden the knowledge base, this chapter examines how community actors can build platforms and arenas for the co-design of social improvement and innovation at the neighbourhood level. It argues that political leaders in both the public and private non-profit sectors may enhance input and output legitimacy by involving local citizens in the co-creation of solutions that improve their social living conditions. The chapter proceeds as follows: We briefly consider the rise, retreat and return of co-production in the public sector before drawing a conceptual distinction between co-production and co-creation and discussing the different uses of co-creation in the public sector and how it may help political leaders serve to enhance input and output legitimacy in times of growing political distrust. We then introduce the notion that co-creation takes place in temporary arenas of collaborative interaction that may be structured, enabled and supported by relatively permanent platforms. This leads to reflection on the move from public sector to neighbourhood-level co-creation, and we present the results of an empirical case study of an experiment with co-creation in a general housing association in Denmark. Drawing on the empirical case study, we discuss the drivers and barriers of co-creation in third-sector organisations before concluding with a summary of the argument and some thoughts on further research.

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Co-production---Its Rise, Retreat and Return The focus on public value is a game changer that transforms the modus operandi of public bureaucracy, since a broad range of public and private actors beyond public managers may contribute to the production of public value outcomes (Alford 2010; Bryson 2011; Bryson et al. 2017; Crosby et al. 2017). The Ostroms’ seminal work supports this argument. Early on, they insisted that the public sector produces public rather than private goods and that a single integrated bureaucratic organisation was unlikely to be the best provider of such goods (Ostrom and Ostrom 1971). Rather, public goods should be produced in and through multi-organisational arrangements that can mobilise the inputs needed to produce desired outputs and outcomes. Eleanor Ostrom later broadened the range of service producers when she reported empirical findings demonstrating how local police performance is improved when they co-produce services with local actors (Ostrom 1973; Ostrom and Whitaker 1973) and how public sanitation and primary education are enhanced through contract-based collaboration between public and private actors (Ostrom 1996). Her seminal work demonstrated how relevant and affected actors may collaborate to avoid the depletion of common pool resources (Ostrom 1990). This path-breaking insight cemented the idea that co-production yields public value. After the initial interest in the co-production of public value outcomes in the early 1990s, the public administration debate on co-production died out in the 2000s. One possible explanation is that the focus on public value and the active contribution of service users to public service co-production was eclipsed by New Public Management (Hood 1991). The neo-liberal advocates of NPM tended to portray the public sector as an inefficient bureaucratic parasite extracting and squandering values produced in the private sector (Niskanen 1971; Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Lane 2002). To enhance operational efficiency, the public sector should be run as a private business. Consequently, the service users were recast as utility-maximising customers operating in newly created service-markets in which public and private service providers compete for contracts and customers. The continued marketisation of the public sector left little space for co-produced public value creation, although service contracting and the relentless drive to improve efficiency spurred the devolution of public responsibilities to private actors (Levine and Fisher 1984; Alford 2014). We have already mentioned how the financial crisis spurred interest in coproduction that helped mobilise resources from civil society and the private economy to create public value. However, the academic interest in co-creation already picked up before the financial crisis (see Alford 2002; Marschall 2004; Brandsen and Pestoff 2006). Hence, we must invoke two additional factors to explain the growing embrace of co-production. First, empirical studies increasingly depicted citizens as empowered, competent and assertive (Clarke 2005; Brannan et al. 2006; Dalton and Welzel 2014) and eager to participate more

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actively and directly in decision-making processes that affect their quality of life (Fung and Wright 2003). Second, NPM was criticised for not delivering on its promises (Hood and Dixon 2015) and for failing to mobilise the resources outside the public sector in the production of public value (Stoker 2006a; O’Flynn 2007). Consequently, researchers started talking about the introduction of New Public Governance (Osborne 2006), which recommended the formation of networks and partnerships through which public and private actors could share knowledge, enhance coordination and co-produce public solutions. More recently, there has been mounting concern for the declining trust in elected government. Large segments of the population are suffering from the impact of ongoing globalisation, the financial crisis and the introduction of disruptive technologies. They blame the political elites for their misery and develop strong anti-political sentiments that make them support populis t leaders who promise to restore the glorious past that never was (Stoker 2006b). The antidote to the rise of right-wing populism is to encourage public officials to listen to the people to get a better sense of their needs and demands and, ultimately, involve them in the co-production of their local living conditions. Hence, while populist leaders prefer to speak to and in the name of a unified and homogenous people, elected governments should actively involve a plethora of public and private actors including users, citizens and civil society organisations in the dialogue-based co-production of public value.

Co-creation---A Legitimacy-Enhancing Tool for Political Leaders The interest in co-production is rising. The public sector is slowly but steadily being transformed from primarily being a public authority standing above and governing the citizens, via its new image as an efficient, business-like service-provider aiming to satisfy its customers, to an arena for the coproduction of public value (Torfing et al. 2019). The public sector is opening up and engaging in cross-boundary collaboration involving a broad range of actors in service production and the development of new and better service systems. This transformation of the public sector is reflected in the burgeoning academic literature (Alford 2016; Osborne et al. 2013, 2016; Brandsen et al. 2018). As the studies and practices of co-production expand, the co-production concept has been stretched to its limits. For example, Osborne and Strokosch (2013) supplement the original concept of ‘consumer co-production’, which aims to empower users in discrete service-delivery processes with a new concept of ‘participatory co-production’ in which users participate in strategic planning and service design and another new concept of ‘enhanced coproduction’, which involves relevant and affected actors in developing new and innovative public service solutions. While most literature use the coproduction and co-creation concepts interchangeably (Lusch and Vargo

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2006), the constant concept-stretching calls for the introduction of a conceptual distinction between the two terms. Hence, we define co-production here as a basically dyadic relation between private service users and public service providers that allows both parties to make good use of their experiences, competences and resources in the service-delivery process (see Bovaird and Loeffler 2012, 1121). In contrast, we define co-creation as the process through which a plethora of public and private actors are involved—ideally on equal footing—in a collaborative endeavour to define common problems and design and implement joint solutions (Torfing et al. 2019). This latter definition brings co-creation close to related concepts of governance networks (Kickert et al. 1997) and collaborative governance (Emerson and Nabatchi 2015), although these interactive governance arrangements tend to be dominated by organised stakeholders rather than lay actors (Nabatchi et al. 2017). Co-creation assumes many different forms, possibly involving individuals (as users, customers or citizens), organisations or communities, leading to continuous improvement or innovation, and producing individual or social benefits. While co-creation is sometimes used to meet social needs by reinventing public service systems, it may also be used as a tool for solving pressing societal problems (Ansell and Torfing 2014), involving citizens in public budgeting (Barbera et al. 2016), or qualifying and improving policymaking in the political and electoral arenas (Munno and Nabatchi 2014). Although there is no solid evidence, local governments tend to focus on co-created service delivery and problem-solving, less so on co-created budgeting, and they focus very little on co-created policymaking bringing together elected politicians and lay actors (Bentzen et al. 2020). As such, co-creation rarely penetrates the political sphere from the administrative realm (but see Ansell and Torfing 2017; Sørensen and Torfing 2018). Elected politicians, who believe that they are supposed to have all of the political power and responsibility but find themselves sidelined by powerful civil servants and professional policy advisors who play a crucial role in policymaking, may be reluctant to share their limited power with users, citizens and organised stakeholders. Nevertheless, co-created policymaking may help elected politicians to strengthen their political leadership in times of growing political alienation and distrust in elected government. Elected politicians are expected to exercise political leadership by means of: (1) identifying and defining societal problems that call for collective action; (2) giving direction to and participating in the design of new and promising solutions and (3) securing widespread support to the implementation of these solutions (Tucker 1995). Each of these three core political leadership functions tend to benefit from co-creation: the problem definition will be more precise and nuanced as a result of dialogue with relevant and affected actors; the number of ideas for how to solve the problem will increase and the integration of these ideas is

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likely to stimulate learning and innovation and participation in policy deliberation will help foster joint ownership of the new solutions, thereby reducing implementation resistance (Torfing 2016). Given the declining trust in government referred to above, elected politicians may find it attractive to co-design improved, and perhaps even innovative, solutions with citizens and relevant stakeholders, as doing so may help to enhance the input and output legitimacy of public governance (Scharpf 1999). Input legitimacy is likely to increase since enhanced citizen participation in collaborative policymaking not only helps to bring politics out to the people so as to enhance their influence, it also brings the people into politics so that they can better understand the complex and difficult conditions for public problem-solving (Booher and Innes 2010). The co-design of new and better solutions will also tend to enhance political support and build trust, at least if the politicians are responsive to the needs, wants and ideas of the population and deliver on jointly formulated solutions. Output legitimacy is likely to increase since the new solutions will have more quality and effectively solve the problems at hand as a result of ‘swarm creativity’ (Gloor 2006) and ‘collective intelligence’ (Landemore 2017). Bringing political, administrative and lay actors together in a problem-focused deliberative process often stimulates policy innovation.

Constructing Platforms and Arenas for Co-creation Politicians may continue to act as ‘elected kings’ who deliver public value outcomes based on more or less informed guesses about the needs of the population and advice from professional policy advisors. Alternatively, they may co-design policy solutions through dialogue and collaboration with relevant and affected actors who can help them to better understand the problems at hand, inspire them to think outside of the box, and enable them to build support for new and bold solutions. Political leaders who want to take this road need to transform how the policy process is structured and organised and to design platforms and arenas for collaborative policymaking. Many public managers have experience with orchestrating collaborative governance processes in networks and partnerships (O’Leary and Bingham 2009; Warren 2009) and can assist in leading politicians to create new institutional designs for co-created policymaking. Collaborative governance is no longer something that is only applied when other hierarchical and market-based governance mechanisms have been tried and found wanting (Emerson and Nabatchi 2015). Collaborative governance must therefore be supported by new institutional designs that provide relatively permanent yet flexible platforms enabling the formation, adjustment and multiplication of temporary arenas of collaborative governance (Ansell and Gash 2017). The platform concept comes from the tech industries. Google and Apple are platforms upon which people are free to build and operate a new application that might be used by millions of people. Hence, platforms

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are interesting in that they facilitate and catalyse new forms of interaction without determining their precise form and content. Some organisations have been turned into platform organisations that, instead of producing a particular solution themselves, aim to facilitate and catalyse collaborative interaction between relevant actors who take on the task of co-designing solutions (Aitamurto 2011). Turning public organisations into platforms for collaborative governance will provide new opportunities for co-production and co-creation and enable public leaders to co-design solutions that solve pressing problems and meet unfulfilled social needs (Janssen and Estevez 2013; Margetts and Naumann 2017). Platforms are generative mechanisms that contain clear access rules and visible contact points, formulate goals and narratives that attract actors, give access to knowledge, advice and professional assistance, offer resources and communication structures that reduce the costs of collaborating, and provide procedures, routines and organisational templates for the formation of collaborative arenas (Ansell and Gash 2017). Platforms are relatively permanent opportunity structures that are drawn upon and support the construction of multiple ad hoc arenas for collaboration and the co-design of solutions. Collaborative arenas facilitate open and explorative deliberation among a group of participants. Some arenas are self-grown while other are prompted or initiated by public leaders who may give them a mandate to solve a particular problem or to develop a response to a new challenge. While such a mandate may limit the autonomy and self-regulating capacity of a collaborative arena, considerable room for self-organisation will remain. As such, the participating actors are able to define their own agenda, choose their own way of working together, and develop and amend their own rules of engagement. While a platform supports the formation of collaborative arenas, the latter will produce valuable experiences and learning that feed back into and help to improve the functioning of the platform. Quite conceivably, some collaborative arenas may eventually reinvent their purpose, themselves becoming platforms that generate new types of arenas. The study of platforms for collaborative governance remains in its infancy, however, and more work is required to understand the interaction between platforms, arenas and the codesign of public value outcomes. This chapter considers how platforms may spur the formation of arenas for the co-design of policy solutions in local neighbourhoods.

From Public Sector to Neighbourhood-Level Co-design of New and Better Policy Solutions The municipal councillors in Denmark generally feel politically disempowered. They suffer from tunnel vision due to the many hours spent processing cases in specialised permanent committees. Municipal councillors tend to be decoupled from policy development, as they are often asked to endorse policy proposals

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developed by public administrators. Finally, they are insulated from the interaction with local citizens and stakeholders that tends to be orchestrated by public managers (Kjær and Opstrup 2016). In order to strengthen their political leadership, local councillors in Denmark have started to create local platforms that allow them to form thematic ad hoc arenas for the co-design of policy solutions. The legal framework that regulates the local platforms is provided by §17.4 of the Danish Local Government Act. The legally grounded platforms enable the formation of collaborative arenas referred to as ‘task committees’ in some municipalities. Such committees typically consist of five politicians and ten citizens (appointed by the local councils based on their background, skills and experiences) working together for several months to explore problems and find new and feasible solutions. They often receive a written mandate from the municipal council, which also discusses, amends and endorses the task committee’s recommendations. The new arenas are chaired by an elected politician, but the collaborative interaction is facilitated by two or three skilled administrators who are not formal members of the task committee, participating instead in their capacity as ‘boundary spanners’ and ‘resource persons’. Gentofte Kommune, an affluent municipality located north of the Danish capital Copenhagen, pioneered the use of task committees in 2015. It has successfully shifted two-thirds of the time that the local councillors used to spend on administrative casework in permanent committees to the newly formed task committees, where, working together with a diverse group of citizens and private stakeholders, they co-design policy solutions to the most pressing problems facing the municipality (Sørensen and Torfing 2018). Many Danish municipalities have been inspired by Gentofte’s positive experiences, and this new way of involving citizens in policy development was recently adopted by ‘3B’, a large general housing association in Copenhagen. Denmark has a large, well-organised non-profit general housing sector, comprising 20% of all dwellings. The construction of new housing complexes is financed by low-interest state loans, and the monthly rent covers the costs of the loans, maintenance, administration and investments in future improvements to the quality of the housing and the local environment. There are about 700 public housing associations of varying size. They are all democratically governed, with a representative assembly that elects a political governing board and local representative assemblies that elect local housing boards (Hansen and Langergaard 2017; Jensen 1997). This comprehensive ‘resident democracy’ is rather unique to Denmark and rooted in national legislation that ensures that the residents in public housing associations have the majority in the governing boards at all levels (Almenboligloven 2019). Since the 1920s, the 3B housing association has aimed to provide good quality housing and to build strong, socially diverse communities. Its current organisational strategy emphasises the need to develop an active and attractive resident democracy. There are three reasons why the 3B political governing board drew inspiration from Gentofte Kommune and introduced task committees (or ‘task groups’ as they are called) as a supplement to its four permanent

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political committees. The first reason is that there is strong pressure from the government on the Danish public housing associations to solve complex problems relating to the integration of immigrants and refugees and to prevent social exclusion. Such problems can only be solved by mobilising the local resources of the residents and their various organisations. The second reason is that the political governing board has launched several initiatives and created new policy solutions that did not seem to solve the problems experienced by the residents. The conclusion is that the elected representatives need input ‘from below’ and must have more dialogue with the residents in order to hit their targets. The final reason is that there seemed to be a growing distance between the elected representatives in the political governing board and the local residents, who were participating less in the housing association’s meetings and felt limited ownership of political decisions. The new task groups are supposed to connect the local residents and their political representatives and engage the former in problem-focused policy discussions that can stimulate democratic participation and ownership (input legitimacy) and enhance the quality of the policy solutions reached by the political governing board (output legitimacy). Adopting a new democratic governance model from the public sector is a bold move for a neighbourhood-level public housing association, and it is not guaranteed to thrive in the new environment. Compared to the relatively wealthy citizens in Gentofte Kommune, the income and education levels of the residents in the neighbourhoods in which 3B has its 12,000 dwellings are much lower. While Danish general housing associations are not social housing associations, as such, Danish law permits local municipalities to jump the queue and place people with social problems and an urgent need for affordable accommodations in vacant dwellings owned by general housing associations. This does not mean that the majority of the residents are poor and destitute, but it certainly limits the expectations for active participation, since participation is often correlated with socioeconomic resources. One might also suspect a civil society organisation like 3B to have limited governance capacity and to be unable to implement a new democratic governance model. However, Danish general housing associations are well-organised and well-functioning organisations, with professional staff that typically include several persons with an academic background. As such, there is little doubt that they are capable of reforming their democratic governance model by introducing the new task groups. General housing associations such as 3B might even have an advantage over Gentofte Kommune regarding the successful implementation of the new model. Both the representatives on the political governing board and the local participants in the task groups are residents and therefore have extensive shared experiences with the problems and challenges arising in large housing complexes with a diverse population and the past attempts to solve them. As such, the task groups might potentially form a ‘community of interest’ in which all of the participants are called upon to do their best for the local

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neighbourhood. Another advantage is that the representatives on the 3B political governing board do not represent specific political parties, which play no role in the election process; hence, there is less conflict and rivalry between the political representatives in 3B than between the members of the Gentofte municipal council. Let us now turn to consider how the 3B local neighbourhood organisation managed to build a new platform supporting the formation of collaborative arenas in which politically elected representatives and local residents can codesign solutions that effectively solve local problems while building a stronger democratic community. The democratic experiment is an ongoing process, so conducting a final evaluation at this point is premature. However, the initial analysis—building on several documents (e.g. policy papers, plans, agendas, minutes), observations from task group meetings and day-to-day interactions in 3B and eight individual interviews with the political, administrative and resident participants in the task groups—provides some broad indications of the local experiences with the co-design of local neighbourhood solutions. The empirical study shows that 3B has some relatively clear rules and procedures for the formation of task groups and uses a standard template when a new task group is established. The political governing board formulates a written mandate for each group. The mandates are all found on the 3B website together with informative updates about the work in the task groups. Two members of the political governing boards are appointed as task group leaders and act as facilitators. One or two additional politicians and an administrative facilitator are appointed. The resident members are drawn from a list of interested people that all of the 3B residents can sign up for. The administrative staff and the task group facilitators also ask around to find local residents who are interested in the topic and issues with which the task group will be dealing. As one 3B manager explains: ‘Who is recruited to the task groups is important—both in relation to interest and competence and to attempt to maintain some degree of control’. Another leader continues: ‘We try to appoint residents we believe are particularly suited to solve the particular task’. While most residents accept the offer to participate in a task group, some drop out after a couple of meetings. The task groups typically hold 4–6 relatively informal meetings and combine short presentations from internal staff and guest speakers with brainstorming, group work and joint deliberation. Over time, the group becomes increasingly focused on finding common ground for problem-solving and producing clear results and recommendations that can be forwarded to the political governing board. The groups typically also evaluate their own work and results in order to facilitate learning. To save money and improve efficiency, 3B recently decided to create a shared administrative service with KAB, another public housing association in Copenhagen. 3B continues to own, govern and maintain its own housing complexes, but some of the service functions offered to the residents and local housing boards will be shared between the two organisations. The task group

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that we have studied was asked to consider how the relation between the new shared administrative service unit and the local housing boards and residents can be improved in terms of both organisation and communication in order to strengthen local resident democracy and improve the tenant services. Our observations and interviews reveal a high level of engagement from the local residents, who take pride in participating and actively contributing to the process. However one local resident left the task group after the first of four meetings because she felt the brainstorming process was too rushed and the work schedule too tight. Other residents complained that the political leaders and administrative facilitator sometimes steered the process too much and that the agenda was not clear enough from the outset. Ultimately, the participants nevertheless agreed that the final policy recommendations contained some new ideas and solutions that would not have been fostered if it had not been for the task group co-design process. To illustrate, the role of the local housing boards was clarified, a new handbook with all of the relevant service information was drafted and a transparent procedure for getting on the waiting list for a new dwelling was established. The policy recommendations were later discussed and adopted by the political governing board of 3B, which rounded off the whole process by thanking the task group participants, who in turn responded by saying how much they had enjoyed participating and how proud they were of the results. The use of co-design enabled 3B’s elected political leaders to enhance input and output legitimacy by soliciting high-quality solutions through the active involvement of local residents in sustained processes of problem-focused policy deliberation. The vertical relations within the organisation were strengthened through enhanced participation, which contributed to new and better solutions. Moreover, the local residents were empowered by their participation in the task group and were therefore likely to play a more active role in local resident democracy in the future. The general impression among the participants was that the co-designed solutions were improvements rather than innovations. Still, several participants thought that some of the ideas and solutions were new compared to what the political and administrative leaders of the organisation had previously been able to come up with. With only minor differences, the same observations apply in the case of the six previous 3B task groups, which have also led to the co-design of solutions that improved the conditions and services for tenants.

Co-created Problem-Solving in Local Neighbourhoods---Barriers and Drivers Despite the relative success around the introduction of platforms and arenas for co-creation in the 3B housing association, our studies have detected a number of barriers, which are related neither to the resources of the local residents nor to 3B’s governance capacity.

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The first barrier concerned the incentive for politically elected representatives to spend time on co-creation with local citizens. Some claim that the politicians on the 3B political governing board might have invested more energy in their task group participation if the remuneration for participating in the group meetings was the same as for participating in the permanent committee meeting. This difference in remuneration indicates that the new democratic governance model based on co-design with local residents does not enjoy whole-hearted political support and has not yet been fully integrated in the work of the political governing board. The second barrier was the unclear agenda of the task group. Several residents say that it took them some time to understand what the group was all about and the problems they were expected to solve through co-design. The brainstorming at the first meeting might have produced more and better ideas if the participants had been clearer about the purpose and type of solutions sought. The need to define a clear agenda for collaborative networks is wellestablished in the literature on network management (Koppenjan and Klijn 2004) and meta-governance (Sørensen and Torfing 2009). The third barrier was the tight schedule that did not allow deviations from the plan for the four task group meetings. The task group leaders, facilitators and participants all felt that the time schedule was too tight and that more time would have allowed the participants to solve emerging conflicts through unplanned, informal discussions and to explore interesting new ideas that might have led to innovative solutions. Innovation requires unhurried time for creative problem-solving and high levels of trust among the participants, which takes time to develop (Torfing 2016). The last barrier was the failure to involve a broader range of local residents through open meetings, online consultation and crowdsourcing. The task group might have been able to solicit further ideas from local residents if they had been invited to give input to the process. Some participants drew on their local networks when contributing to the task group deliberations, but a wider inclusion of local voices may have generated useful input to the discussion, although it would have required considerable time, effort and resources to solicit and process this input. Despite these barriers, the task group on which we have focused here was relatively successful in accomplishing its task. Several drivers contributed to this positive process and outcome. The first such driver was that the new platform for resident participation in policymaking—the task group model adopted and adapted from Gentofte Kommune—provided a user-friendly template and standard procedures that enabled the formation of the collaborative arena to co-design new solutions in the turbulent months after the administrative merger with KAB. The second driver concerned the procedure for recruiting residents to the co-design process. Whereas those who registered on the 3B website to indicate their interest in participating in a task group tended to be ‘the usual suspects’ who were already involved, those receiving special invitations from the task

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group leaders and facilitators were new to the democratic process, displayed great commitment, and had some fresh perspectives that were conducive to a creative problem-solving process. As tenants in 3B-owned dwellings, they had a keen interest in the issues discussed, and they felt honoured to be a part of the process, in part due to the special invitations. The third driver was the dialogical process in the meeting that fostered open discussion based on mutual respect, which allowed everybody to voice their opinion regardless of their position in the organisational hierarchy. One of the participating residents described how the open discussion stimulated learning and consensus-building: Participation in the task group gave me opportunity to express my opinion and to raise critical concerns. I also listened to the other participants, who had other concerns and worries, to compare my own concerns with theirs. The discussions helped me see things in a different light and think a little more broadly about the problems and solutions. It all went very well. At some point we had broadened the debate and had many balls in the air, but we managed to draw things together in the end, which was good.

Other residents mentioned that the elected politicians from the political governing board were a little conservative and seemed to struggle to participate in brainstorming and group discussions and that the administrative facilitators were very insistent on adhering to the overall rules and principles. However, they subsequently added that the politicians’ initial insecurity was gradually overcome and that the residents ultimately had plenty of influence on the concrete ideas and proposals which emerged. In sum, our study of neighbourhood co-design identifies some typical barriers and drivers. The drivers seem to have stimulated the collaborative design of new solutions (thus enhancing input legitimacy), while the barriers have mostly played a role by putting a lid on the innovation process (thereby limiting output legitimacy). If the barriers were to be overcome through a combination of hands-off platform adjustments and hands-on leadership interventions, the new task groups would appear to have good prospects to achieve the ambitious goal of reinvigorating the already well-established but somewhat crisis-ridden resident democracy in the Danish general housing sector. This bold prediction is supported by the fact that other general housing associations have already begun to copy the new model from 3B, which they have made readily available to other organisations.

Conclusion and Ways Ahead This chapter began with a discussion of the rise, retreat and return of coproduction in the public sector. It then introduced a conceptual distinction between co-production and co-creation, arguing that co-creation may help elected politicians to exercise political leadership by co-designing new and

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better solutions to pressing problems in ways that enhance input and output legitimacy. This political usage of co-creation to enhance participation in policy development has already inspired elected politicians in several countries to try mobilising local citizens and stakeholders as a resource in innovative policymaking (see Lees-Marshment 2015; Hendriks 2016; Neblo et al. 2018; Sørensen and Torfing 2019). A new Danish model for co-created policymaking has spread from the municipal to the neighbourhood level. As such, the 3B public housing association has created a new platform for the construction of collaborative arenas for co-designing solutions to pressing neighbourhood problems. Our case study illustrates the usefulness of the new institutional designs for co-created policymaking involving elected politicians and local residents. The new task groups are participatory and collaborative arenas that help the elected politicians on the 3B political governing board to connect with the residents who elected them. They also help the elected politicians to better understand the problems at hand, to design new and promising solutions and to develop widespread support for their implementation. This enhances the political leadership of the politically elected community leaders. Our study has identified some well-known drivers and barriers. Future attempts at overcoming the barriers through changes in the institutional design and the exercise of leadership will help reap the fruits of co-designed, neighbourhood-level policymaking. Perhaps the single most striking finding is how easy it has been for a local neighbourhood organisation to adopt a new and innovative policymaking format with roots in the municipal sector. In the Danish context, however, this finding is less surprising than it may seem. Denmark has lengthy traditions of collaboration at all levels, which is rooted in the cooperative movement founded by Danish peasants and workers in the late nineteenth century, the corporatist institutions in the labour market, and a well-organised civil society, the latter contributing to and supplementing the welfare services (including free healthcare, education and specialised social services) provided by the public sector in many ways. Hence, there is a high level of social and political capital in Danish society that supports current attempts to promote co-creation inside and outside the public sector. Co-creation in general, and the co-design of policy solutions in particular, may thrive in both the public sector and the private non-profit sector and help elected political leaders to enhance legitimacy while strengthening their political leadership. While a competent, empowered population and a well-developed civil society are important conditions for success, the form and functioning of purpose-built platforms and arenas also prove important. The Danish experiences from Gentofte Kommune and now also 3B may provide inspiration for other Western countries interested in experimenting with co-creation to connect political leaders with increasingly assertive citizens. This chapter has aimed to refocus the debate on co-creation and its role in today’s shared-power world, in which ideas, resources and authority are widely

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distributed and need to be brought together through democratic processes of collaborative interaction in order to solve pressing societal problems. It has illustrated the main point about how elected politicians may experiment with the formation of new platforms and arenas enabling the co-design of policy solutions. However, more research is needed in order to build solid knowledge both about the role of co-creation in politics and the ability of neighbourhood organisations to enhance local participation and their ability to solve local problems through new forms of community-level co-design. Theoretically, we need to consolidate the distinction between coproduction and co-creation through the development of conceptual taxonomies and discussions of the grey area where co-production shades into co-creation and vice versa. We also need more theoretical work on platforms and arenas to better understand the new forms of generative governance that they bring forth. Methodologically, we must challenge ourselves to combine qualitative case studies with the quantitative measuring of key variables in comparative case analysis, which could contribute to the discovery of competing combinations of factors that facilitate co-creation in different sectors and at different levels. Empirically, we must study actual processes of policy-related co-creation and co-design as they unfold in time and space in order to identify the barriers and drivers and reflect on how the former can overcome and the latter expanded. In particular, we need the comparative study of this type of co-design in different neighbourhoods and housing associations with different compositions of tenants to test the general validity of our findings.

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CHAPTER 19

It’s All in the Practice: Towards Quality Co-design Nicole Moore and Mark Evans

Introduction Co-design is a methodology of applied research and professional practice that supports inclusive problem-solving. It places the citizen and/or stakeholder at the centre of a planned process of learning that focuses on the achievement of citizen-centred outcomes (Evans and Terrey 2016, 246). Design thinking enables reconciliation of competing perspectives into new problemsolving frames (Dorst 2011) with the underlying belief that direct citizen engagement with products or services will lead to better and more legitimate outcomes (Parker and Heapy 2006). Although co-design as a mode of participatory governance has become an essential ingredient of better policymaking and service design, the problems of co-design practice are not widely understood. The key conclusion from much of the academic and practicebased literature is not that more co-design is needed but that better practice is needed (Boddy and Terrey 2019). If poorly practiced co-design can become a way of reinforcing governance problems rather than resolving them; for example, a commitment to co-design that in reality is tokenistic and unwilling to share power can ultimately generate more cynicism and negativity among citizens and undermine public trust (NESTA 2019). In short, participatory governance solutions can be compromised by the way they are practiced. This chapter seeks to bridge the knowledge gap by highlighting evidencebased insights into what works in co-design practice. The discussion that N. Moore · M. Evans (B) University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_19

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follows is organised into four sections. The first two sections identify the key features of typical co-design processes, providing a benchmark for the evaluation work that follows. Section one provides a thick description of a typical co-design process. Section two reviews the range of tools used in co-design for affecting deep participation and learning. Section three then outlines the methodology used to guide a systematic review of the recent evidence base. Section four presents the findings and constituent elements of a conceptual model for diagnosing what might work in different social settings. It is hoped that the chapter will be useful to governments and practitioners embarking on processes of problem-solving which utilise co-design approaches. However, it has not been written as a ‘one-size fits all’ solution to critical governance challenges. It provides the start of an ongoing conversation within government, with other partners in governance and crucially, with citizens themselves, about the best way to solve social problems, target scarce resources and prepare for the future.

Co-design as a Process of Intentional Learning Co-design is about understanding the lives of others (Buchanan 2001; Leadbeater 2004). It draws on ways of working that are commonplace in the design of objects and products and suggests that those ways of working can be applied to wider system and process design. Co-design tends to involve three ideal-type agile stages of learning; all of which are iterative and require engagement and re-engagement between researchers, practitioners and citizens. These include: (1) discovery and insight; (2) prototyping and (3) evaluating and scaling co-design interventions. Figure 19.1 provides an illustration of an ideal-type agile co-design process.

Fig. 19.1

Agile service design

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As Richard Buchanan (2001, 12) observes: One of the most significant developments of system thinking is the recognition that human beings can never see or experience a system, yet we know that our lives are strongly influenced by systems and environments of our own making and by those that nature provides. By definition, a system is the totality of all that is contained, has been contained, and may yet be contained within it. We can never see or experience this totality. We can only experience our personal pathway through a system.

The first stage of learning involves establishing a shared representation of concerns and problems with the target group; it draws on evidence that is synthesised and tested for its robustness but it also generates a broad range of perspectives on an issue as seen by different citizens. This requires creating a learning environment that allows citizens to tell their own stories, rather than making assumptions about their preferences. It is based on the observation that citizens never experience the delivery system as a whole; just pathways through the system. We therefore seek to understand the problem through the eyes of the user. It doesn’t require big numbers unlike a statistically significant survey but it does require spending quality time with a small number of participants, mapping their journeys, identifying obstacles and developing mitigating strategies. This stage is about creating a safe space where participants can imagine and progress towards a future rather than becoming trapped in past models or ways of thinking. It uses a creative design dynamic to encourage new ways of thinking. Some of the techniques that can be used here include getting practitioners to experience the world from the perspective of others, getting citizens to draw or capture in non-written form their perceptions of a better future and generally trying to encourage emancipation from past certainties and developing a space where creativity and learning, and taking risks, is encouraged. Beyond these process elements this stage also involves a large scale search for alternatives, options and innovations that address the issue in focus. Prototyping The second phase of learning focuses on developing prototype interventions based on a joint commitment with key partners and developing appropriate rapid feedback research methods to support that dynamic. Here the logic is of a design experiment (John 2016). The experiment focuses on the design of an intervention as the core research problem. The techniques used at this stage will be contingent on the amount of time available to the project team. For example, the ideal-type experiment would allow sufficient time to observe and manipulate the intervention over a period usually in one location, until

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acceptable results emerge. The experiment would progress through a series of design-redesign cycles with ongoing engagement with core participants to ensure that the intervention adjusts to the local context. The design experiment claims to provide an evidence base about ‘what works’ in the early stages of the development of an intervention; in addition, it may provide a staging post for a broader and more generalisable test in the future. Evaluation and Scaling The third stage then reverts to a more traditional evaluation phase where collaborative options analysis takes place on the basis of assessing pilot interventions through the use of Randomised Controlled Trials (John 2016; Zimmerman et al. 2011) or other robust forms of evaluation such as qualitative comparative analysis (Ryan 2016). In addition, enlightened practitioners would seek to evaluate the quality of their practice throughout the process of learning. This would include: (1) pre-engagement surveys in live cases to determine participant characteristics and the diversity of viewpoints represented in each process (note: these measures can be collected through post-engagement surveys for completed cases); (2) post-engagement surveys to assess participant experiences, perceptions and agreement on the recommended solutions and, (3) targeted interviews with a small number of participants or key stakeholders in order to unpack survey findings using reflective questioning (Moore 2019, 25).

Tools of Engagement for Deep Participation Various methods and tools can be deployed to facilitate deep engagement and learning in the process of discovering new ways of designing policies and services. As Table 19.1 illustrates, these include action learning, gamification, network and journey mapping tools, and reflexive practice. These learning methods are used to improve the quality of information about the citizen or stakeholder experience of the problem under examination. This enables designers to build an evidence base on what does or does not work from the perspective of citizens and stakeholders to inform the prototyping of solutions. Two of these tools require further elaboration here as they are particularly novel in the context of the latest wave of co-design initiatives (NESTA 2019). Action Learning in Policy and Service Design Action learning is a methodology that is used in co-design to ensure both the integration of citizen/stakeholder voice in decision-making and research data about the subject of enquiry. It requires the development of an inclusive process of learning involving policy/service developers, the target beneficiaries and researchers into a cohesive design group (Stoker and Evans 2016, 269– 270).

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Table 19.1 Learning tools to enhance participation Tools

Purpose

Action learning

Recognises that solutions to problems can only be developed inside the context in which problems arise • See connections between issues and events • Create a safe learning environment • Focus on the whole rather than the parts • Seek a holistic solution to the problem Proceeds from the assumption that for many people play is an effective way to make sense of complex problems. Games provide for critical thinking, individual and collective problem-solving, options analysis and priority setting, and experimentation in a safe, pressure-free learning environment • Process complex information • Engage with confronting questions • Facilitate deep thinking • Enable innovation Observes that most interventions are delivered through network arrangements: • What actors/resources are critical to the delivery of progressive outcomes? • Who is not there? • Which actors/resources should be closer in or further away from problem-solving • What does progress look like? • What are the key barriers to progress? Provides insights to the citizens’ journeys, challenges and aspirations: • What does the journey tell us about their story in terms of past failures/successes • What has been the focus and what is missing? • What do you see as the barriers, risks and opportunities? A co-designed plan to navigate the barriers: • What changes are possible, desirable and sustainable? • Why are these changes relevant? • How can these changes be made?

Gamification

Network mapping

Journey mapping

Reflexive practice

The group of citizens or stakeholders with technical and research support, scope and define the problem and identify the change objective to be produced; review the range of options to produce the change objective; choose the option to be pursued; design a prototype; pilot, monitor, evaluate and refine. Figure 19.2 provides a graphic representation of how this type of learning process can be conceptualised in the context of service design. It is important to note, however, that this is very much a process of crafting rather than science; learning through doing. Moreover, the learning process tends to occur in a condensed period of time and research is undertaken in real-time and integrated directly into the decision-process. This stands in stark contrast

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Fig. 19.2 Action learning in service design (Source Evans and Terrey 2016, 249)

to dominant traditions in evaluation research where research informs pre- and post-decision-making. Gamification Gamification engages people through amusement or fun and deploys game mechanics or game-design elements in non-game contexts (Burke 2014). Through games, participants can experiment, explore options and evaluate trade-offs in a safe, pressure-free environment. Play builds greater knowledge of the problem from both the perspective of designers and beneficiaries and allows for a more targeted approach that fits the behavioural features of a segmented audience (John et al. 2011). Gamification can include multiplayer computer games involving large, diverse audiences, or single player computer games for a small target audience. Gamification does not have to be hi-tech. It can also include more traditional board games or role plays (NESTA 2019). As noted at the outset of this chapter, the success of co-design is all in the doing—hence there is significant reliance on specific forms of capability in method that are not always in plentiful supply in public bureaucracies. This includes a range of soft governance capabilities such as communication, facilitation, negotiation and adaptive capacity that tend to crystallise around qualities such as emotional intelligence and the ability to empathise and build trusting relationships. At the same time there is a need for expertise in a range of innovative qualitative methods that emanate from both policy science and social psychology. Of course, this capability gap also provides the potential for partnership building with knowledge institutions (public and private) that possess the requisite skills.

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Methodology This section presents the methodology informing our systematic review of the determinants of successful co-design practice drawing on a selection of codesign studies from 2006 to 18 (Gough and Tripney 2016). We designed a Systematic Review Framework (hereafter ‘the framework’) to identify key questions and definitions, criteria for the selection of relevant literature and the process to be undertaken to identify and assess literature (see Box 19.1). A particular emphasis was placed on understanding the importance of representation in co-design processes, given the salience of this theme in the existing literature. By representation we refer to the characteristics that define why particular participants were selected to represent non-participants: how inclusive representation is of affected people and professionals; the plurality of viewpoints present; the degree of autonomy exhibited by participants and, the degree of equality between participants. Box 19.1 Systematic review framework Key Questions: 1. What variables influence outcomes in co-design processes? 2. Is there a relationship between those variables and representation in codesign processes? Definitions for the purpose of this review: Representation Co-design

Participation outcomes

Individuals acting on behalf of others in the context of public participation Citizen involvement in public participation processes where design thinking is used to drive innovation and creativity Impact of participation on representatives, the deliberative/design process and/or on the deliberative/design outputs

Criteria for Literature Selection: 1. Literature must describe variables related to representation in a co-design context in order to address the key questions for this review. 2. Literature may include both theoretical and case studies to cover empirical and normative perspectives. 3. Literature should be peer reviewed with suitable citations to ensure reliability of findings. 4. Literature must be in English language with full text available to support in depth review. Search Strategy: 1. Google Scholar, Analysis and Policy Observatory, Wiley Online Library, JSTOR, Web of Science, SCOPUS and Australian Public Affairs Full Text will be reviewed to identify suitable literature.

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2. Abstracts will be reviewed initially to confirm suitability against the selection criteria. 3. Select literature will then be reviewed in detail to identify conceptual themes.

The initial search strategy focused on a database search of peer reviewed sources with relevant citations, including both books and journal articles. The key words used during the search included both ‘representation’ and ‘participation’ in co-design processes. In addition, the terms ‘co-design’, ‘coproduction’ and ‘co-creation’ were used interchangeably to source literature. The initial search yielded a higher number of applied case studies than theoretical studies. Subsequently, a more targeted search for relevant literature on representation in co-design processes was undertaken through a year-to-year review of all issues of the international journal CoDesign from 2006 to 2018. A total of 24 relevant sources were identified and assessed against the selection criteria (six applied case studies and 18 theoretical studies—see bibliography for a list of sources).

Findings This section presents the findings of the systematic review. The review examined the variables that influence co-design practice to determine what role representation plays in enhancing the legitimacy of public decisions. The systematic review identified three key findings. Representation and Non-representation Related Variables Matter Representation related variables, such as inclusivity, autonomy, equality and plurality, influence outcomes in both co-design and deliberative engagements; however, so too do non-representation related variables, such as process quality, political authorisation and connections between citizen engagements and formal decision-making bodies. Representation must be inclusive, equal and diverse. Representatives must be autonomous and supported by quality processes that allow them to be active contributors. Both governments and public sector organisations must value the input of citizens as democratic agents, and be committing to taking their views and recommendations seriously. Quality Methods, Context and Diversity Matter The political/social context and diversity of people affected by the topic of focus will influence the selection of citizen engagement methods. Quality process design and facilitation plays a more significant role in accommodating diverse contexts and participants than any particular design method.

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Citizen-Stakeholder Interactions Matter No one variable is likely to be sufficient in and of itself. Measuring both the achievement and interactions between variables is likely to enhance understanding of the dynamic nature of citizen engagement in an ever-changing social context. As public service organisations increasingly strive to enhance public trust and the legitimacy of decisions made, effective citizen engagement that adequately represents those most affected by those decisions is crucial. It is not sufficient that public sector organisations seek the views of those most vocal in their communities. In the next section, the key findings from the systematic review are integrated into a conceptual model for measuring the quality of co-design practice.

Modelling Better Practice in Co-design As Fig. 19.3 illustrates, the systematic review highlights six principles of engagement that may well hold the key to success in co-design practice (for a more detailed examination, see Moore 2019). The principles of engagement are:

Fig. 19.3 Conceptual model for assessing the quality of co-design engagement with citizens

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Inclusive Representation of Affected People and Professionals It is not possible to involve all people in every decision-making process. What is important is to ensure that those most affected by the issue, along with those who will ultimately be responsible for implementing solutions, are represented in the process. Affected people and professionals offer unique insights that collectively ensure solutions respond to the real-world contexts in which issues arise. Autonomy and Equality of Participants The freedom to form and transform views on a particular issue is an indication that participants are engaging with autonomy and not constrained by fixed ideas or coerced by higher power interests. Without autonomy, participants can’t genuinely consider the viewpoints of others in order to be open to new possibilities. Autonomy and equality go hand in hand since power imbalances must be addressed and participants must feel listened to and respected to contribute equally to engagement processes. Plurality of Viewpoints and Engagement Methods It is important to ensure a range of viewpoints is considered when making decisions on matters of public interest. Modern societies, however, are diverse and not everyone will engage in the same way. Offering multiple engagement methods can increase the range of perspectives that contribute to public sector decisions and enhance the quality of potential solutions. Quality Process Design and Facilitation High quality engagements recognise that participants are experts in their own experiences with valuable insights to share. This requires a shift in thinking from being the experts on a particular topic to being facilitators with expertise shared between participants. Public engagements must carefully balance the need for respectful collaboration between diverse ‘experts’ with the ability to provoke different opinions in order to enable innovation. Often this involves mixed methods that allow people to contribute individually, in small groups and in large group discussions. Transmission of Citizen Engagement Outcomes to Formal Decision-Making Bodies Engagement processes usually occur in informal public spaces rather than through formally constituted decision-making bodies, hence requiring some form of transmission to take effect. Transmission can, however, be impacted by whether or not citizen-generated recommendations are transferred indirectly

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via other stakeholder groups, or directly, to those with the power to make decisions. When recommendations are transferred via stakeholder groups, it is important to ensure the original intent of the recommendations is retained. Citizen Participation as an Accepted Democratic Value Political support for citizen participation has the power to increase the legitimacy and acceptance of public sector decisions. Committing to accepting, at least in-principle, the solutions offered by citizens recognises the value that their participation makes to identifying workable solutions. While it is likely to be unfeasible (and perhaps unwise) to agree in full to solutions before knowing what they are, the level of commitment should be made known before citizens agree to give up their time to participate in the first place. This includes making clear the boundaries and constraints that are not open to discussion and providing a clear remit or guiding question to focus their involvement. In addition, the review identified three outcome related measures for assessing the impact of each of these variables on the legitimacy of public decisions. These include: participants agreeing on the solutions or recommendations; participants trusting in the legitimacy of the process to influence decision-making, and consequentiality, defined as decision makers accepting citizen-generated recommendations.

Sin of Omission---The Role of Politics in Co-design There is a conspicuous sin of omission in our systematic review of the current evidence base. With the exception of the recognition of the importance of consequentiality to ensure the legitimacy of co-design processes, most of the studies identified in our sample appear impervious to the role of politics in shaping policy and service outcomes. Fundamentally, the key stumbling block to implementing co-design in practice lies in garnering and sustaining the support of politicians and senior bureaucrats. Co-design challenges the established ways in which policy is made and services are designed, delivered, monitored and evaluated. Most significantly, it questions dominant public sector cultures and values which privilege the role of technical expertise over citizen expertise and input. The policy elite in most mature democracies are largely econocrats or legally trained (Self 1975; Stoker and Evans 2016) who find it difficult to suspend rational problem-solving paradigms, and be more exploratory, experimental and open to discovery (Evans and Terrey 2016). Hence the starting condition for co-design is risk appetite in a political and bureaucratic context, where short-term political imperative trumps long-term developmental change. There must also be appetite to try something new and get a different answer to a complex issue, as well as an appetite for collaboration when the organisation may not know how to collaborate effectively, and, of course, access to skills and expertise in design methods (Boddy and Terrey 2019). By implication, political permission is required by policy-makers

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to invest time in the inception of co-design projects, engage meaningfully with end users, and, address power imbalances in decision-making (Evans and Terrey 2016). There is some applied evidence that situates co-design in the context of a challenge to the established political order in which designers should view themselves as engaged in a war of ideas with the political class (see: Evans 2012, 2013; Evans and McGregor 2018). This suggests the importance of convincing politicians and their political advisors of the merits of co-design processes, inviting them to be members of project governance boards or in certain instances to be project participants, developing sophisticated costing models (that demonstrate the savings that co-design projects can deliver to the broader service system) and developing demonstrable measures of success aligned to the core political agenda (Fabian Society 2010). Most significantly, designers need to engage in effective strategic communication that uses narrative and story-telling to demonstrate the public value of co-design interventions (Lowndes 2016).

In Conclusion: Towards Quality Co-design Co-design is not a panacea for all our policy-making problems. The main conclusion from this chapter is not that more co-design is needed but that quality practice is needed, aimed at integrating citizen input into policymaking processes, building active citizenship and ensuring public trust. This requires the establishment of participatory governance systems that are: • • • •

clear in scope and purpose; deploying appropriate engagement methods; inclusive in composition with co-designed processes; underpinned by evidence-based outputs and clearly articulated outcomes to guide decision-making and operational delivery; • sensitive to context; • responsive to participants through ongoing engagement that demonstrates the value of their participation and • subject to ongoing evaluation and review, to ensure continuous improvement. This final observation is particularly important. Quality co-design requires more understanding of the difficulties of working with citizens to change the ways decisions are made and implemented. Despite the significant growth of participatory practice and theory though, there is still little shared understanding among all those involved; particularly government. Co-design practice has emerged from many disciplines and in many sectors, often quite separate from each other, and the lack of effective communication

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across these disciplines and communities of practice has limited the opportunities for shared learning and the effective development of theory and practice. However, there is significant evidence in this chapter that developments in design thinking can provide public managers with a unique opportunity to establish a community of practice in citizen-centric governance devoted to the creation and delivery of public value. In sum then, co-production which recognises the importance of design and the need to share power can radically improve the quality of life. It can contribute to creating more active citizens, help in the management of complex problems in public service design and delivery, foster new collaborative relationships required for twenty-first century governance, and develop political literacy, skills, confidence and ambition in the citizenry. Co-design is thus not only an essential ingredient of better policy-making but a key measure of the quality of democratic life.

References Boddy, J. & Terrey, N. (2019), Design for a Better Future: A Guide to Designing in Complex Systems. London: Routledge. Buchanan, R. (2001), Design Research and the New Learning. Design Issues, 17(4), 3–23. Burke, B. (2014), Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things. Brookline: Biliomotion. Dorst, K. (2011), The Core of ‘Design Thinking’ and Its Application. Design Studies, 32(6), 521–532. Evans, M. (2012), Home to Work—An Evaluation. Canberra: DEEWR Innovations Fund. Retrieved 16 December 2019 from: http://www.governanceinstitute.edu.au/ research/publications/recent-reports. Evans, M. (2013), Improving Services with Families—A Perfect Project in an Imperfect System. Canberra: ACTCSD. Retrieved 16 December 2019 from: http://www. communityservices.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/566444/Strenthen ing-Families-ANZOG-Evaluation.pdf. Evans, M. & McGregor (2018), Mandate for Change: Towards an Integrated Service Delivery Model. Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Industry, Innovation and Science. Evans, M. & Terrey, N. (2016), Co-design with Citizens and Stakeholders. In: Stoker, G. & Evans, M. (eds.) Evidence-Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences: Methods That Matter. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 243–261. Fabian Society (2010), Hardest to Reach, the Politics of Multiple Needs and Exclusions. Fabian Policy Report, 63, London: Fabian Society. Gough, D. & Tripney, J. (2016), Systematic Reviews for Policy. In: Stoker, G. & Evans, M. (eds.) Evidence-Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences: Methods That Matter. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 43–68. John, P. (2016), Randomised Controlled Trials. In: Stoker, G. & Evans, M. (eds.) Evidence-Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences: Methods That Matter. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 69–82.

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John, P., Cotterill, S., Moseley, A., Richardson, L., Smith, G., Stoker, G. & Wales, C. (2011), Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Leadbeater, C. (2004), Personalisation Through Participation: A New Script for Public Services. London: Demos. Lowndes, V. (2016), Narrative and Storytelling. In: Stoker, G. & Evans, M. (eds.) Evidence-Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences: Methods That Matter. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 83–102. Moore, N. (2019), Co-design and Deliberative Engagement: What Works. Democracy 2025 Report No. 3. Retrieved 23 December 2019 from: https://www.democracy 2025.gov.au/documents/Democracy2025-report3.pdf. Nesta (2019), Our Futures, by the People, for the People. Retrieved 16 December 2019 from: https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/our-futures-people-people/. Parker, S. & Heapy, J. (2006), The Journey to the Interface: How Public Service Design Can Connect Users to Reform. London: Demos. Ryan, M. (2016), Qualitative Comparative Analysis for Reviewing Evidence and Making Decisions. In: Stoker, G. & Evans, M. (eds.) Evidence-Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences: Methods That Matter. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 83–102. Self, P. (1975), Econocrats and the Policy Process. London: Macmillan. Stoker, G., & Evans, M. (2016), Connecting Social Science and Policy. In: Stoker, G. & Evans, M. (eds.) Evidence-Based Policy Making in the Social Sciences: Methods That Matter. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 263–270. Zimmerman, J., Tomasic, A., Garrod, C., Yoo, D., Hiruncharoenvate, C., Aziz, R., Ravi Thiruvengadam, N., Huang, Y. & Steinfeld, A. (2011), Field Trial of Tiramisu: Crowd Sourcing Bus Arrival Times to Spur Co-design. SIGHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1677–1686.

PART VI

Co-delivery of Public Service and Outcomes

CHAPTER 20

Co-delivering Public Services and Public Outcomes Elke Loeffler

Introduction At least until the emergence of the Covid-19 crisis, co-delivery has been a mode of co-production which has generally received much less attention than forms of ‘citizen voice’ such as co-design, public participation mechanisms (such as consultation on new airports or high-speed rail links) or streetlevel protests, such as the gilets jaunes in France or the worldwide Friday protests by schoolchildren against climate change. While the actions of citizen volunteers co-delivering public services and outcomes ‘behind the scenes’ are often praised in formal presentations by elected politicians, the co-delivery role of citizens is often taken for granted as ‘the fourth pillar’ in the mixed welfare state, in addition to state, market and the voluntary sectors (see also Chapter 12 in this Handbook by Beth Gazley). However, the global spreading of the Coronavirus since January 2020 has placed the co-delivery role of citizens firmly in the limelight. It has become evident that no government will be able to deal with this crisis on its own but rather requires multiple contributions from citizens in their role as codeliverers of public services and outcomes—for example, local people are taking joint action with local authorities and third sector organisations to support high-risk groups with the delivery of essentials, parents are teaching their school-aged children at home (with or without guidance from teachers) during lockdown, other citizens are acting as role models for behaviour change E. Loeffler (B) Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_20

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by encouraging the practice of physical distancing, and some UK citizens have even been making medical gowns and other ‘personal protective equipment’ at home for the use of health and social care staff, given the inadequate preparation by the NHS. While it is too early to assess the longer term impacts of Covid-19 on codelivery, there is already evidence that this crisis has also boosted the use of digital forms of co-delivery, e.g. many citizens are keeping in touch through online contacts with vulnerable and isolated people, while school and university classes, seminars and workshops are taking place through video platforms, such as Zoom. Of course, these are not entirely new activities but are now much more prevalent because necessary. This chapter will provide an overview of modes of co-delivery, including the use of digital technologies. It will then assess the academic evidence on the extent to which user and community co-delivery has improved public value through prevention, detection, treatment of social problems and rehabilitation from them. Finally, it will consider the future potential of user and community co-delivery in the post-Covid-19 world.

What User and Community Co-delivery of Public Services and Outcomes Is---And Isn’t Co-delivery is about citizen action contributing to the actions of professionals working in public services to improve public services and/or outcomes. This means that in co-delivery co-production partly overlaps with volunteering (Loeffler 2021). Of course, not all forms of volunteering qualify as co-delivery—when there is no input from public service organisations, volunteering is a pure form of user self-help or community self-organising. However, when volunteers get support from public service organisations, then volunteering initiatives turn into co-production. For example, when citizens join in their local sports associations to provide training for young people, this does not qualify as co-production if the sports association is financed by member fees, sets its own regulations and does not receive any support from the public sector. In contrast, the volunteering of citizens at major sports events cofunded by the public sector, such as the Olympic Games, can be considered as co-delivery. At the London Olympics in 2012 70,000 citizens were accepted as volunteers after going through a rigorous application process and put through an orientation day at the Wembley Arena with the 50,000 paid staff—and further venue-specific training was later provided (Tatam 2012). Similarly, at the local level, volunteers often co-deliver important support at sports events in public facilities or with public funding. The same distinction applies to digital co-delivery in a public service context. When local people connect and provide support to each other through a hyperlocal network (e.g. provided by a commercial provider or based on a free software platform), this is pure community self-help. However, it becomes a form of co-delivery if the online network is funded and evaluated

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by public service organisations—as in the online peer support forum SHaRON (2020)—https://www.sharon.nhs.uk/—which was co-designed by clinicians and patients at Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to provide peer support for people with health conditions (initially mental health, now more general). In the last decade, service providers in both public and private sectors have made increasing use of self-service technologies to encourage citizens to do more for themselves in order to lower staff costs. These self-service solutions have met varying degrees of acceptance by citizens. A comparison of private and public self-service technologies by Collier et al. (2014, 68) showed that ‘customers are willing to take on a partial employee role only if they see a directed benefit to them’. Self-service technologies with such benefits may therefore trigger new forms of digital co-delivery and, where they require professional inputs, should not be simply equated with user self-help or community self-organising. The following section will provide a typology of different types of user and community co-delivery—both offline and online or mixes of both.

Types of User and Community Co-delivery of Public Services and Outcomes Community co-delivery has played a key role in the development of the concept of co-production. The research by Parks et al. (1981) on policing in Chicago pointed to the impact of community co-delivery on public safety in disadvantaged neighbourhoods: when police officers used cars for policing instead of walking the beat, they lost access to the knowledge and social networks of local communities and the crime rate went up. This research raised awareness that the police needed the community as much as the community needed the police (Loeffler 2018, 212). While community co-delivery, and in particular volunteering by citizens through non-profit and voluntary sector organisations, has received a lot of attention in the literature (see, for example, Chinman and Wandersman 1999), there has been much less focus on user co-delivery, perhaps because it often takes place in non-public settings and is therefore less visible (Loeffler 2021). Furthermore, user co-production may be taken for granted as ‘hidden work by people outside paid employment’ (Boyle et al. 2006). However, Alford’s (2009) influential book on co-production focussed in detail on user co-delivery in three sectors. Moreover, data from a European citizen survey in five countries showed that significantly more citizens contributed to user coproduction, including co-delivery, than to community co-production (Bovaird et al. 2016). In Table 20.1 a taxonomy of different types of co-delivery is proposed and, for each type, examples are provided of both user and community codelivery. Moreover, as digital technologies are increasingly being used in co-delivery to supplement or replace face-to-face contacts, digital examples

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Table 20.1 Types of user and community co-delivery Types of co-delivery

Examples of user co-delivery

Co-implementation of projects or programmes

Users working with public service organisations to implement projects (e.g. members of Mosaic Clubhouse in London) Users co-implementing digital projects with public service organisations (e.g. ICT-based cardiac rehabilitation in Huntingdonshire, UK) Tenants co-managing social housing (e.g. Witton Lodge Community Association, UK)

Co-management of projects and public facilities

Contributing to (peer) support groups

Co-influencing behaviour change

Taking joint action to improve public services

Examples of community co-delivery

Community members working with public service organisations to implement projects (e.g. Digbeth Public Art Project in Birmingham) Linking community capacity to local needs based on mobile phone apps (e.g. TRIBE in Leicestershire County Council) Community asset transfer (e.g. communities co-managing local libraries and community centres) Support groups, comprising Service users supported by community members, public service organisations to working with public service provide peer support (e.g. in Offenbach Employment Agency, organisations (e.g. Mosaic Clubhouse London) Germany) Trained local people Users with a specific lived experience facilitating behaviour providing coaching for users of public services (e.g. change of other service users and staff (e.g. in Federal Public Manchester Community Health Trainers) Planning Service for Social Mentoring by trained Integration, Belgium) volunteers (e.g. mentoring Peer support by service users scheme for people in with specific lived experience financial difficulties in (e.g. SHaRON mental health Augsburg) platform and app) Community volunteers Service users co-delivering working with public services services (e.g. young people in youth centres in Surrey County (e.g. volunteers teaching children in schools in Japan) Council) Community volunteers Electronic patient portals working with public services helping patients to become digitally (e.g. in the digital active in decisions about their archives of the National health care Library in Finland) Digital volunteer networks supporting public services in emergency and disaster management (e.g. GoodSAM app recruiting NHS Volunteer Responders for Covid-19)

(continued)

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Table 20.1 (continued) Types of co-delivery

Examples of user co-delivery

Examples of community co-delivery

Taking joint action to improve public outcomes

Service users undertaking self-care with support of public service organisations (e.g. via the interactive portal My Diabetes My Way in Scotland) Service users making use of e-health and e-care technologies enabling self-care (e.g. Clevercogs™ digital platform for people in care homes or getting home care in Scotland)

Parental involvement in primary education NHS Volunteer Responders providing short-term telephone support as ‘check-in and chat’ volunteer to individuals who are at risk of loneliness as a consequence of self-isolation in the context of Covid-19

Source Adapted from Loeffler (2021)

are also highlighted. All examples are discussed in more detail in the following text. User and community co-delivery may involve a wide range of citizen actions as Table 20.1 shows. Types of co-delivery include co-implementation of projects, co-management of public facilities, contributing to peer support, co-influencing behaviour change and taking joint action to improve public services and outcomes. These types of co-delivery may overlap to some degree. For example, a specific peer support initiative may not just provide emotional support but may also facilitate behaviour change. However, each type of co-delivery puts a different emphasis on what is co-delivered and which co-delivery mechanisms are used, as the following case studies show. Co-implementation of public projects through citizen action is a common type of co-delivery. In particular, public service providers working in social care, mental health and housing often enable contributions from service users or communities to specific projects or programmes. An example of user co-implementation is a major refurbishment project of the charity Mosaic Clubhouse in London. Mosaic Clubhouse is part of the international Clubhouse model, which aims at improving the mental health and well-being of its members through co-production between staff and members throughout all its activities. The move to the new building in 2013 gave staff and members the opportunity to work together to fully equip the new building, plant the garden, review all policies and procedures, and carry out all necessary training, particularly training in health and safety and food hygiene, as the new café and information hub were both open to the public (Ness 2014). In Birmingham, the Digbeth Public Art Project was a two-year project which was co-implemented by a local arts company with local residents, as part of the redevelopment of Birmingham Coach Station (Farrell 2010). This included the joint creation of three permanent artworks which enhance visitor

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experience of the coach station and reflect the rich cultural history of the site. Engaging the community in each step of the artwork projects allowed the project to reach more networks, resulting in numerous ‘in kind’ and financial contributions from the public sector and business. The art installations have been praised by public, press and public services alike and are considered to be a key success factor in the ‘place-shaping’ of this regenerating area of Birmingham. Increasingly, digital technologies are used in the co-implementation of public service projects. An example is provided by Active+, an ICT-supported cardiac rehabilitation project of Huntingdonshire District Council and several health partners, which teaches patients to use remote monitoring technology, including activity trackers, blood pressure monitors, scales and peak flow meters for lung function, to keep an eye on their health and to record routinely how regularly they are taking medicine—patients are taught how to access and review their own data during the eight-week course, which also involves weekly exercise classes at the local leisure centres and a social group after each class to encourage discussions between participants and allow questions to be asked of professionals (LGA 2018, 13). A similar project, but also involving members of the community, not just service users, in co-implementing public service projects through digital mechanisms is given by a project in Leicestershire which uses TRIBE, a social action technology platform to facilitate social prescribing, to help grow community capacity, and to micro-commission services directly via up-skilled community assets, such as local volunteers, organisations, etc. TRIBE can be downloaded as a mobile app to personal or work phones and tablets or accessed through a web portal, so that people are instantly able to make and see requests for support within the community they live or work in or register their availability to help meet some of these requests (see http://www.healthandcareleicestershire.co.uk/download/Hea lth-and-Care-Integration-Bulletin-March-2020-final.pdf). Another type of co-delivery involves the co-management of public facilities by service users. In Birmingham, the Witton Lodge Community Association (WLCA), which also acts as a Community Landlord with its own housing association, provides an example of co-management by service users (as tenants of the housing association) (Jones 2012). Witton Lodge was a rundown social housing estate in the 1990s, where many houses faced demolition, since no government grants were available for urgently needed repairs. WLCA was set up in 1994, based on government gifting land, against which capital could be raised to build new homes. It has eight Resident Directors, who play a major role in the management of the Association, giving residents a strong influence on the redevelopment of the estate. By 2000 WLCA was able to negotiate housing allocations with the City of Birmingham, which enabled it to pursue a policy of social integration via housing allocation (Jones 2012). Just as WLCA benefited from transfer of public sector land, there are now many other examples of community asset transfer, defined as ‘the transfer of

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management and/or ownership of public land and buildings from its owner (usually a local authority) to a community organisation (such as a Development Trust, a Community Interest Company or a social enterprise) for less than market value – to achieve a local social, economic or environmental benefit’ (My Community 2020). In the UK, as a result of public austerity, many public libraries and community centres are now co-managed by local communities with (fewer) public sector staff (and there are also many examples of previously public facilities now being completely managed by local communities, so exemplifying ‘self-organisation’ rather than ‘co-production’). Another type of co-delivery is co-performing peer support. While this is most common in social care and mental health services, the Offenbach Employment Agency in Germany has launched a peer-support initiative for jobseekers as part of a Governance International Co-Production Training Programme. This part of the project involved small-scale experimentation with six jobseekers who volunteered to be matched in pairs after a careful analysis of their strengths and their areas for improvement (Neseli and Herpich 2020). Each peer support pair kept closely in touch, and had regular meetings with staff to identify milestones to be achieved together. An initial assessment showed that the jobseekers co-performing peer support had managed to improve skills and, most importantly, increase their self-confidence. After the 120 days of the first experimentation phase, all six job seekers had either been placed in a trainee programme or employment. While some types of user peer support are primarily co-delivered one-toone, peer support can also provide collective benefits when it is co-delivered in groups (Slay and Stephens 2013, 8). In particular, user peer support may be strengthened through contributions of community members. Mosaic Clubhouse in the London Borough of Lambeth works with people with mental health issues to improve their well-being and employability. It strongly focusses on enabling Clubhouse members to provide mutual support in their journeys towards recovery (Ness 2014). The charity also works with volunteers who are trained to provide specific support services. An important type of co-delivery involves co-influencing behaviour change. This can occur, for example, when service users with a specific lived experience are supported by public service organisations to facilitate behaviour change of citizens and/or staff working in public services, often through peer support, which may be provided face-to-face or via an online platform, as in SHaRON (2020). Increasingly, service users with a specific lived experience are recruited by public service organisations to be trained and employed as staff in order to enable their former ‘peers’ to change their behaviours. In Belgium since 2004, the Federal Public Planning Service for Social Integration has been employing trained ‘Experts by Experience’ (EbEs) in poverty and social exclusion’ to harness their specific experience to improve the access of people living in poverty to public services provided at the Federal level (Van Geertsom et al. 2017). While, at least initially, many public professionals found it difficult

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to recognise the expertise and non-academic knowledge of EbEs, there is evidence of behaviour change on the part of staff who now ‘consider service users as people, rather than as ‘cases’ who are legally entitled to a service’ (Van Geertsom et al. 2017). Co-influencing behaviour change can also occur in other ways, often with the help of local communities. Since 2006, Community Health Trainers in Manchester have been supporting behaviour change of vulnerable groups in deprived neighbourhoods towards a more healthy lifestyle (Lawson et al. 2014). This co-production programme is based on a partnership between the NHS, the local authority and local voluntary organisations, recruiting and training people from disadvantaged groups who become paid Health Trainers. They provide personalised support to those most at risk of ill-health using empowerment techniques, so that participants are able to develop and use their own skills to change their behaviour. Co-influencing behaviour change may also involve trained volunteers mentoring and coaching service users who need support. For example, the local authority of Augsburg has developed a mentoring scheme to provide people with financial difficulties with additional advice and support, going beyond the support provided by social care services (Klopf et al. 2016). The social mentors come from all walks of life, including housewives, students, bankers, etc. They provide many different kinds of support, such as a finance check, identification of available social support, joint drafting of a budget plan, overview of debts and negotiation with creditors who need to get paid. Case managers in the City of Augsburg Council help to support the social mentors, organise their neighbourhood surgeries and facilitate regular meetings of the social mentors for evaluation, training and planning. When service users or communities improve public services by undertaking joint actions with public service organisations, the contribution of citizens often goes beyond minimal inputs as a passive service recipient. In the services literature, Normann (1984) distinguishes the ‘enabling logic’ in services, which depends critically on mobilising those contributions that users can uniquely provide to enable service outcomes from the ‘relieving logic’, in which providers do the service for the user so that users mainly need to specify their demands. However, as a result of austerity and overly specified service contracts, social workers, especially in adult home care, have had to adopt a ‘time and task’ approach to completing personal care tasks, which can leave little time to enable service users to do things for themselves or others. There is anecdotal evidence, however, that staff working in services for young people have had more flexibility to enable young people to co-produce public services by taking joint action to improve them. In the UK, there is a statutory duty which protects clear, positive outcomes for young people, rather than prescribing specific services. Surrey County Council has responded by a fundamental transformation of services for young people (Tisdall 2014). In particular, the local authority encouraged Youth Centres to co-deliver public services with the young people attending them (Bovaird and Loeffler 2014).

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In health, electronic patient portals are intended to help service users to become active participants in decision-making about their own health care and thereby make health services more effective—successful portals appear to include functions such as secure messaging, patient reminders and prescription refill orders (Shaw et al. 2018). Public service organisations also take joint action with community volunteers to improve public services in many sectors. In the context of austerity, many public service organisations have reduced staff numbers by recruiting unpaid volunteers to provide services more efficiently, e.g. in library services. Many social care service organisations have also recognised the need to support volunteer carers, e.g. by providing information sessions, training and respite care, turning previously self-help activities into co-production between carers and the public services. The use of volunteers to co-deliver teaching at elementary school level is less common but in Japan the intergenerational education programme REPRINTS (Research on Productivity through Intergenerational Sympathy) was launched in three local authorities in 2004 (Yasunaga et al. 2016). This provided older people with the opportunity to co-deliver teaching of children through picture book reading, which was considered developmentally appropriate not only for the children, but also for adults. Experienced trainers provided extensive training, ongoing advice and feedback to the senior volunteers about book reading techniques, after which the volunteers participated in group activities with children and read picture books to them at kindergartens, public elementary schools and childcare centres once every one or two weeks. An evaluation showed positive effects on both the older people involved and the school-children and indirect positive effects on their parents. Local communities may also improve public services through digital codelivery. The National Library of Finland motivated over 100,000 volunteers to donate over 400,000 minutes of time to help correct errors resulting from the digitalisation of its historical newspaper archive (Miettinen 2012). An online platform, Digitalkoot, asked people to verify the words in a fun and engaging game from their own computers, as a way of helping to preserve Finnish culture. The accuracy of this proofreading of Finnish citizens via Digitalkoot was estimated at over 99%. Increasingly, digital volunteer networks also support public services in emergency and disaster management. In the UK the GoodSam app is usually used to alert people with medical training to nearby emergencies, so that volunteers can provide potentially life-saving interventions before the arrival of professional emergency services (Crouch 2020). This app is now being used to recruit volunteers supporting the NHS in the Covid-19 crisis. Digital technologies also play an important role to match supply and demand of volunteers. In the context of Covid-19 large national charities in the UK, such as the Trussell Trust, have developed their own online schemes to match volunteers with critically important activities in their local area, such as food

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banks (Butler 2020), although, if they do not involve public services or public outcomes, they constitute self-organisation rather than co-production. As the Public Value Model discussed in Chapter 2 in the Handbook shows, users and communities taking joint action with public service organisations can contribute directly to improving outcomes, not only by helping to improve public services. In particular, people living with long-term health conditions may make important contributions through self-care to co-deliver improved health and well-being. For example, the University of Dundee in Scotland created the new interactive online portal My Diabetes My Way in 2008 as the official NHS Scotland online portal, giving people with diabetes and their caregivers information materials to assist them with self-management, access to an electronic personal health record and engagement with peers via social media (Wake et al. 2014). Furthermore, older and vulnerable people living in residential care in specific local areas in Scotland now have access to ‘smart home’ and ehealth and e-care systems such as CleverCogs™ (Carnegie UK Trust and Just Economics, n.d.), which provide them with better support to deal with daily issues and allow social care workers to monitor and connect with their users more easily. CleverCogs™ also improves digital participation by providing simplified access to the internet, so that service users with few digital skills can connect with their local communities, supporting both user and community co-production. Communities as well as service users can make significant contributions to improving public outcomes through co-delivery. As Honingh et al. (2018) point out, there is evidence that parental involvement in primary education is important for the educational achievement of their children. In particular, home involvement programmes supporting parents of deprived communities to read with their children such as the Research in Educational Achievement and Development (READ) co-production project in Aarhus are proven to have a statistically significant improvement effect on children’s school performance (Nørregaard Jacobsen and Hjortskov 2015). Nevertheless, the school-centred perspective of education, which has also been reinforced by the attention given to the PISA tests of the OECD, has neglected the co-delivery role of parents and other members of the community in children’s educational performance. Clearly, the current Covid-19 crisis has raised awareness of the contribution of civil society to achieving key public outcomes. In the UK, more than 750,000 citizens responded to a government call for volunteers to support the NHS (Royal Voluntary Service 2020). While some of the tasks of the NHS Volunteer Responders involve co-delivery of new public services, e.g. delivery of food parcels to risk groups who are self-isolating, some also involve short-term ‘check-in and chat’ telephone support for individuals who are at risk of loneliness as a consequence of Covid-19 self-isolation (Royal Voluntary Service 2020). These examples illustrate that the different types of co-delivery highlighted in Table 20.1 can be found in a wide range of public services. They also show

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that digital technologies are now playing a significant role to enable or support each of these different types of co-delivery, so that co-delivery now consists of a mix of face-to-face and digital interactions between citizens and public services organisations.

The Role of Co-delivery in Pathways to Outcomes---Evidence from Health, Social Care and Public Safety Services This section will focus on the contributions of user and community co-delivery to public outcomes within pathways to outcomes. After an outline of the concept of pathways to outcomes in the context of co-production, we will provide examples from social care, health and public safety services as to how user and community co-production improves public outcomes through problem prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. A more detailed analysis of the extent and effectiveness of pathways to outcomes from co-delivery in these services is provided by Chapter 4 in Loeffler (2021). Pathways to Outcomes Through Problem Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation Pathways to outcomes are a familiar concept in health and social care (e.g. McSherry et al. 2010; Jonas et al. 2012) and in many other contexts (especially development studies), albeit often under other labels, such as ‘logical frameworks’, ‘logic models’, ‘strategy maps’, ‘value creation maps’, etc. (Bovaird 2012). The availability of national outcome frameworks for the NHS and social care in the UK has raised the question of which pathways are most effective for achieving these outcomes. The concept of pathways to outcomes provides a dynamic perspective to coproduction. Rather than just focussing on final outcomes, it makes involved stakeholders aware of how co-production processes contribute to intermediate outcomes, which may be equally valuable (see, for example, Jonas et al. 2012). Pathways to outcomes also help in mapping exercises to visualise the contributions to intermediate and final outcomes of various stakeholders, including public service organisations and service users and communities. This can help to overcome perspectives which are overly organisation-centred and which view outcomes solely as the result of public service interventions, neglecting co-delivery by service users and communities. Furthermore, the mapping of pathways to outcomes allows identification of opportunities for better service coordination and integration. Most importantly, involving staff and service user in the mapping of pathways to outcomes may uncover important alternative approaches—for example, the joint development of pathways to outcomes with staff and a local network for people living with dementia showed that not only improved care mattered for people living with dementia but that a key

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outcome to be achieved was ‘having more fun’ (Brown et al. 2016). Similarly, a workshop with young jobseekers in the Offenbach Employment Agency in Germany revealed that one key outcome considered to be important from a users’ perspective was improving resilience, given that job seekers often have to deal with disappointments when they are turned down for a job and need to motivate themselves to keep trying, in other words their self-efficacy needs to be bolstered (Loeffler and Schulze-Böing 2020). Although specific pathways to outcomes need to be developed for each individual service context, there is an underlying pattern to almost all such pathways, since policy interventions typically contribute to solving problems through three different mechanisms, which are shown in Fig. 20.1—they either help to prevent the problem, or to treat it, or to support recovery or rehabilitation after the problem has been treated (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019a). For each of these three ‘core’ pathways, we can, in turn, map several contributory pathways. Future occurrence of a problem can be prevented by the public sector either by reducing the prevalence of those social conditions which raise the probability of the problem occurring or being severe (e.g. policy can attempt to reduce the prevalence of lung cancer by taxing tobacco or making smoking illegal in public places)—or, alternatively, behaviour change can be promoted among those likely to give rise to the problem, so that they desist from that behaviour (e.g. encouraging people to stop smoking). Similarly, there are contributory pathways to the core pathway of improving treatment—it is always important to detect the problem as early as possible (e.g. regular health checks of smokers’ lungs) and then to find appropriate treatments.

To reduce social harm from problems To prevent problems

To change social conditions giving rise to problems

To improve problem treatment

To change behaviour of those involved in problems

To improve detection

To improve recovery/ rehabilitation To design recovery & rehabilitation

programmes To ensure recovery and rehabilitation programmes are followed

Fig. 20.1 A generic model of pathways to tackling social problems (Source Adapted from Loeffler and Bovaird [2019a])

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Finally, the core pathway to improve recovery and rehabilitation requires the design of suitable programmes to reduce the negative consequences from problems and/or strengthen people’s resilience. Further, the people concerned have to be convinced to follow the rehabilitation pathway. In the following sections, we discuss how co-production can play a role in each of these core and contributory pathways towards co-delivery. Co-delivery in Pathways to Outcomes in Prevention In most OECD countries there has been increasing interest in co-production approaches for prevention of social problems. This applies in particular to public health, so we will exemplify co-delivery through prevention by reference to health examples. It has long been recognised that people can contribute greatly to their own health by behaviours which help prevent future health problems arising, not only improving public outcomes but also helping government to reduce expensive health services. Clearly, many prevention activities of service users or communities are triggered by public sector action, such as the recent public campaign on ‘hands hygiene’ to reduce the risk of Coronavirus infection. Other prevention activities may involve direct collaboration between public service organisations and citizens, as in the falls prevention initiative of the Aberdeen City Health and Social Care Partnership (Thompson and McConnachie 2019). This codelivery initiative was co-designed with service users at risk of falls who attended exercise classes and volunteered to be trained as ‘Falls Ambassadors’, co-delivering Stepping Forward Together sessions with health professionals in local communities to sensitise people at risks of falls and motivate them to take action to improve their self-care. Another innovative health prevention programme is the Gesundes Kinzigtal (‘Healthy Kinzig Valley’) scheme in the Black Forest in Germany, which emerged from a joint venture between a network of physicians in Kinzigtal and a Hamburg-based health care management company in 2006 and targets a population of about 71,000 people in rural areas (King’s Fund, n.d). In particular, it provides targeted care management and prevention programmes for particularly high-risk population groups, such as older people, those living in nursing homes, people with specific conditions, and those with high body mass index, growing from 875 patients in 2006 to 10,190 patients in 2014, most of whom are actively engaged in fitness and other prevention programmes, with an average age of 48 years (and 16% being above 65) (Höhl 2016). Multiple evaluations have shown improving health outcomes—in particular, lower mortality rates for those enrolled. Furthermore, between 2006 and 2010, it generated a saving of 16.9% in one area evaluated, mainly through helping to reduce the growth in emergency hospital admissions by two thirds (The King’s Fund, n.d.).

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Nevertheless, in spite of strong evidence of improved outcomes resulting from co-produced prevention activities, such schemes are still not common in Germany or other OECD countries (Gmeinder et al. 2017). Co-delivery in Pathways to Outcomes in Problem Detection We will exemplify co-delivery through problem detection by reference to examples in public safety. This can be quite controversial, especially in administrative law countries (Loeffler 2018)—for example, a qualitative study comparing modes of co-production in social services and public safety in Germany showed that some focus group participants were very sceptical about opportunities for co-production in most policing activities, given the predominance of hierarchical governance in this service (Loeffler and TimmArnold 2020)—but they did believe that co-delivery can play an important role in emergency and preventative services, especially in relation to problem detection. An extensive literature review on the role of co-delivery in policing and criminal justice shows that crime detection is central to several pathways to outcomes, including crime deterrence and, through punishment of crime, to desistance and removing criminals from the community (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019b). Communities can make an important contribution to crime detection activities of the police through crime reporting and being willing to act as witnesses. In order to facilitate crime reporting, emergency services operate hotlines such as 999 in the UK. More recently, such mechanisms have been reinforced by internet and social media platforms, which allow the police to crowdsource information for the detection and pursuit of crime (Loeffler 2021). For example, in 2004, Dutch police introduced an online system, CitizenNet (Burgernet ) (Meijer 2012, 200), which allows the police to call for information on recent crimes from citizens in the network and passes all information received from citizens quickly to relevant police units. Participants are later informed about the results. In 2012 Burgernet had enrolled more than 1.4 million citizens (9% of the population, across almost all municipalities) and was used in about 600 time-critical situations each month, with 11% of cases being solved through information from Burgernet participants (https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_network). Of course, co-delivery for crime detection or treatment may also lead to undesirable results—for example, when citizens do not respect legal frameworks and turn into vigilantes or stalkers. In particular, in areas such as East Germany people may still remember when citizens had to collaborate with the Stasi to spy on fellow citizens. This reminds us that co-production needs to be guided by democratic governance principles. More research is required on potential governance pitfalls of citizen co-delivery in public safety (see chapter 31 in this Handbook by Steve Smith), particularly with the increasing availability of surveillance technology.

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Co-delivery in Pathways to Outcomes in Problem Treatment Looking more widely at the role of co-production in treating social problems, we will use health to exemplify the possibilities. Co-delivery of better health treatment is often called ‘self-management’ or ‘self-care’, defined as the care taken by individuals towards their own health and well-being and that of their family and the community (Department of Health 2007), often supported by ‘experts by experience’—e.g. others who have suffered from a similar condition. Self-treatment (e.g. through drug injection or dialysis) has become much more common over the years, although still much less prevalent than it might be (Patel and Patel 2014). To put this in context, 90% of people in the UK use over-the-counter medicines to manage minor conditions without going to their GP and in 2010 973 million over-the-counter medicine packs were sold by pharmacists, compared to 1028 million items prescribed by doctors (Proprietary Association of Great Britain 2011). GPs have been estimated to spend currently an hour a day seeing patients with minor conditions that could be self-treated—costing the NHS around £2 billion p.a. (Proprietary Association of Great Britain 2010). Indeed, the Department of Health has estimated that 39% of GP consultation time is spent treating patients with selftreatable minor ailments (Colin-Thome 2004, 11). Moreover, there is research evidence that education of patients in self-management can have favourable outcomes—e.g. in cancer care an evidence synthesis suggested that ‘For the most part, self-management education interventions may help relieve symptoms of depression, anxiety, and emotional distress and improve quality of life’ (Howell et al. 2017, 24). The potential for change was highlighted by a 2007 survey, which showed that over 90% of people were interested in developing self-care skills and over 75% believed they would be more confident if they had support from a professional or peer (Department of Health 2007). Another way in which self-care can be co-delivered is through trained community health volunteers (CHVs). In the very different context of hardto-reach communities in rural areas in Kenya, a recent study showed that the proportion of CHVs with appropriate skills to examine children for signs of common illnesses improved from 4 to 74% after six months of training—and the proportion of caregivers who first sought treatment from a CHV increased from 2 to 31% (Shiroya-Wandabwa et al. 2018). However, despite these potential benefits, there is evidence that healthcare professionals do not explore the potential of self-care fully. In 2005, a national survey found that more than 50% of patients who had recently seen a healthcare professional had not been encouraged to develop self-care skills and one-third said they had never received any advice regarding self-care (Department of Health 2005). However, support is now available in the NHS in the UK, e.g. the six-week generic self-management courses in the Expert Patients Programme helps people to develop practical skills and coping strategies to deal with the emotional and psychological impact of living with a long-term condition (Coulter et al. 2013).

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Co-delivery in Pathways to Outcomes in Rehabilitation/Recovery from Social Problems By their very nature, many social problems are long-term or even permanent, so ‘recovery’ is generally not an appropriate description and ‘rehabilitation’ is more about learning to live with or stabilising the problems, rather than diminishing them (Loeffler 2021). A key co-delivery approach to rehabilitation which is widely promoted by social work is peer group support, either in pairs—two individuals helping each other—or in groups, and undertaken through face-to-face meetings or digitally. Such peer support groups to improve rehabilitation have been particularly common in health and social care but occur also in other services. For example, in the UK the charity KeyRing has developed a housing model promoting peer support of vulnerable adults. They form Living Support Networks which each comprise ten people living within walking distance of each other (Parker et al. 2019)—nine are vulnerable adults and the tenth is a Community Living Volunteer who lives rent-free in the network area and provides at least 12 hours each week to help Members with issues such as bills and budgeting, getting into education, employment or volunteering and also promotes peer support between Network Members and links with neighbours, community organisations and local organisations. In some areas, KeyRing also runs Community Hubs where Members can drop in for one-to-one peer support, socialise, plan events or get information and advice. An independent evaluation suggested the KeyRing model provided a 120% return on the original local authority investment (Housing LIN 2018), with improved outcomes including moving people from higher cost support, reducing the need for overall support, avoiding crisis and recovering more quickly from it. Subsequently, variations of the KeyRing model have been implemented in wider settings in the UK. In Germany, there has been increasing interest in ‘multigeneration houses’ where different generations live together and share communal areas and a range of social and leisure services and activities, so that older and young people can support each other. Originally a housing and social care model but now emerging as a grassroots community movement (Labit and Dubost 2016, 49), by 2006 multigeneration houses were beginning to be co-financed by the federal government. By 2017, there were 540 multigeneration houses with more than 61,000 users (Bundesamt für Familie und zivilgesellschaftliche Aufgaben 2018), with strong federal support. As a visitor to a multigeneration house observed, ‘pensioners volunteer to read books to the children and run a “rent-a-granny” service to relieve exhausted parents. In return, teenagers offer to show elderly people how to use computers and mobile phones’ (Oltermann 2014 cited in Labit and Dubost 2016, 50). Although there is little rigorous evidence about its effectiveness, this kind of intergenerational peer support clearly offers volunteers a wide variety of opportunities to co-deliver services and activities with residents (Bundesamt für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend 2020).

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Perspectives of User and Community Co-delivery in a Post-Covid-19 World As we finalise the chapters of this Handbook, the whole world is in the grip of Covid-19, with huge infection rates, appalling death rates and the threat of lockdown, at least for the most vulnerable people in the population, for many months ahead. What has this got to do with co-delivery? At one level, it is very heartening to observe how ordinary people, all over the world, have responded immediately and generously to help their neighbours in practical ways—e.g. by shopping for those who can’t get out to shop for themselves, by telephoning regularly to ensure that the most vulnerable people remain OK and have at least the chance of a short conversation with another human being, and even by taking people to hospital or by looking after other people’s kids, at some risk to themselves. However, the pandemic of Covid-19 has not led to a universal outbreak of community co-production or even self-organisation. This is most dramatically exemplified by the NHS Volunteers Scheme, for which 750,000 people registered in a matter of days—a heart-warming response and one which demonstrates the willingness to co-produce. However, what happened next is less encouraging. For weeks, few tasks were allocated to this willing volunteer force, as the public services lacked effective mechanisms to identify whether these volunteers were acceptable, what they could best do, who needed such support and how they could best be put in touch with each other to arrange mutually congenial and practical interactions—indeed, in the first month, only 20,000 tasks were allocated (Hodder 2020). The lessons from Covid-19 are stark and highly challenging—citizens have resources, assets, strengths and capabilities which are relevant to making a significant difference to the outcomes achieved in modern societies. What is more, many of them have a strong willingness to see these capabilities made use of for positive social and public purposes, including the co-delivery of public services. However, we do not yet have a public service system which is designed, organised, incentivised or experienced in making use of the rich potential of citizen contributions. This is the challenge for future policy and research in public management—turning the huge potential of our citizens into the quality of life improvements for those citizens. The examples highlighted in this chapter demonstrate that it can be done. The growing needs of our populations in this crisis cry out for it to be done. There is now a need for citizens to find ways to insist—‘Get it done!’

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CHAPTER 21

Co-producing Desistance? The Role of Peer Support Trish McCulloch

Introduction Since the 1960s, participatory discourses and practices have steadily moved to the fore in public, political and academic discourse. Mobilised originally by critiques of liberal and representative democracy (Barber 1984), topdown governance (Hirschman 1970) and a rethinking of the public sphere (Habermass 1962/1989), participatory practices were initially advanced as a mechanism for political and social change through processes of citizen empowerment (Arnstein 1971). By the 1970s, the work of Ostrom and colleagues (Parks et al. 1981) on the relationships between public services and service users in US urban reform prompted particular attention to the participatory dynamic within public service provision and to co-production as an emerging concept. In the intervening years, co-production has become a central strand of global public policy, as governments and citizens across jurisdictions have been required to forge new solutions to evolving economic and social challenges. Like most socio-political turns, the rise of co-production as a ‘new’ and ‘transforming’ approach to the delivery of public services, and the now personalised outcomes to which they aspire, can be traced to a number of coalescing economic, social and political developments, many of which are outlined in Part One of this Handbook. Amidst this interplay of ideas, the proposition that public services can only deliver personalised outcomes through a mix of public, T. McCulloch (B) University of Dundee, Dundee, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_21

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private, individual and collective contribution has become both compelling and challenging (Pestoff et al. 2012). In a global welfare landscape marked by demographic diversity, widening inequalities, economic austerity and welfare retrenchment, the appeal and promise of co-production for the delivery and reform of public services appears firm. The consequent challenge is whether public services, and the social relationships they depend on, can be remade to respond to this ‘new’ truth. If co-production is perplexing for public services generally (Boyle and Harris 2009), its place in criminal justice systems and services can appear particularly problematic. In neo-liberal cultures of control, criminal justice systems continue to be constructed, typically, within an explicitly punitive and coercive frame (Garland 2002). Meanwhile, its subjects, that is, those sentenced, are often constructed as the objects upon which justice is done. In this corrective, and for some corrosive, space, the idea of co-production as a legitimate or possible endeavour is highly questionable (McCulloch 2016; Carlen 2012). However, this is only part of the criminal justice story. Running alongside this dominant punishment narrative is another story of desistance. In this story, desistance from crime is not only possible but an expected and even natural trajectory (Maruna 2001); it belongs principally to the individual desister, it occurs variously through interpersonal and social relationships, and it can be aided and obstructed by those relationships—professionals included (Weaver 2019). It is within this story that co-production finds a place. To the extent that desistance is understood as an individual, relational and social process of progression, recovery and re-entry, questions of individual, group and collective co-production become pivotal. This chapter makes the case for a co-productive approach to supporting desistance from crime, with a focus on the role of peer support. My interest in this particular mode of co-production reflects a concern to look beyond individual-level, professionally-centric and sustaining approaches to co-production and desistance, towards more inclusive, empowering and disruptive forms. I begin by providing a brief review of how co-production is understood and conceptualised before going on to demonstrate the centrality of co-production to efforts to support desistance, as both an individual and social endeavour. From here, I consider the role of peer support in coproducing desistance, with a view to contributing to knowledge of how we understand, enable and advance this old–new modality within this complex space. I conclude with optimism and caution, culminating in a call to coproducers, in our various roles and relationships, to proceed in ways that embody the integrity and transformative potential of the modalities discussed.

Understanding Co-production Early scholarship on co-production places emphasis on the critical relationship between public service professionals and the people who use public services in routine service delivery (Parks et al. 1981). This work remains significant

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in highlighting the regular contributions made by service users and others in the progression of public service outcomes, and the gains to be achieved through maximising opportunities for citizen contribution. However, as coproduction gained ground as a concept, so too did its applications, such that co-production became used to describe a wide range of activities and practices, occurring at different stages of the service production process, and involving contributions from individuals not ‘in’ the same organisation (Ostrom 1996). In the same period, co-production was evolving as a concept and practice amidst significant economic, social and welfare change, characterised by the advance of new public management values of individualism, marketisation and welfare retrenchment (Pestoff et al. 2012). Against this shifting backdrop, coproduction became cast simultaneously as: (i) a transforming paradigm for public services and public service relationships, (ii) a mechanistic attempt by western governments to address pressing welfare challenges through the introduction of new consumerist technologies of welfare, and (iii) as Ewert and Evers (2012) observe, all the ‘flavours’ in between. Perhaps reflecting the rapid expansion of co-production in appeal, application and scope, a number of more recent definitions have sought to draw the parameters of co-production a little more firmly, with varying degrees of success. The definition in Bovaird (2007) included a temporal dimension to co-production, giving emphasis to ‘regular and long term professional-citizen relationships’, though this dimension was removed in the updated definition proposed in Bovaird and Loeffler (2012). NESTA’s definition included equality as a defining feature of co-productive relationships (Boyle and Harris 2009), a value that, though appealing for some, is demonstrably difficult to operationalise (Pestoff 2012). Around the same time, Alford (2009) sought to delimit citizen co-producers to those who directly consume public services, so distinguishing between co-producers and volunteers. However, delineating between those who do and do not ‘use’ a public service introduces new layers of complexity if we consider the direct and indirect beneficiaries of public services. The above issues speak to the challenge of defining a concept that is evolving across time and space, amidst significant social and political change and in contexts where issues of power and inequalities weigh heavily. In this chapter, my understanding of co-production starts from an acknowledgement that there is no single or coherent narrative for co-production (Ewert and Evers 2012). Rather, as Ferguson (2012, 57) observes, discussing associated concepts of empowerment and participation, ‘these are contested concepts, terrains of political struggle and debate on which different social forces seek to impose their preferred meaning’. Admittedly, the challenge of constructing coproduction in this way is that it can be difficult to sell, implement and measure, particularly in environments inclined to certainties. However, it usefully underscores that co-production is an art more than it is a science; it is relational, contingent and constantly ‘in the making’ (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016). This

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has important implications for efforts to advance co-production and for the role of and relationships between co-production actors. While recognising the necessarily fluid nature of co-production, definitional clarity remains important. My understanding of co-production thus draws upon Ostrom and colleagues early work in this area (Parks et al. 1981) and on the more recent definition by Bovaird and Loeffler (2012), each of which understand co-production as the mix of activities that public service agents and citizens contribute to in the progression of public service outcomes. In using this definition, I understand citizens as people who have a direct and indirect relationship with the outcome(s) being progressed; I recognise different levels of co-production—what Bovaird and Loeffler (2012, 5) describe as ‘The Four Co’s’ (co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment); differing degrees of contribution among members, and different forms of co-production, namely, individual, group and collective forms (see Weaver and McCulloch 2012). Individual co-production can be understood as producing outcomes that benefit the individual participants and might include the progression of mutually agreed goals between a service user and practitioner within a criminal justice sanction. Group co-production typically brings users or former users together to shape or provide services, and might include reciprocal relationships between public services and mutual aid groups and/or the involvement of users in decision-making processes focussed on policy development, service design, delivery and evaluation and/or the operational and strategic management of services. Collective co-production is understood as those strategies that involve and produce outcomes that aim to benefit whole communities rather than just groups of users. In setting out this understanding, it is important to note that the categorisations provided are not discrete categories, other than in a conceptual sense. Rather, they underline the plurality of co-production and enable us to think beyond familiar forms.

Co-producing Desistance Desistance is understood as the process of ceasing and refraining from criminal behaviour among those for whom offending has become a pattern (McNeill et al. 2012). As a research framework it describes a body of theoretical and empirical research which seeks to understand how and why people move away from criminal identities and behaviours and into something good (Maruna 2001). In this respect, desistance research can be distinguished from rehabilitation research in so far as its focus, ostensibly, is less on what professionals do to produce rehabilitation and desistance and more on how people achieve desistance themselves, including through relationships with others. Importantly, desistance theory underlines that, like most personalised well-being outcomes, desistance exists independently of interventions but can be supported by them (McNeill 2006).

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Existing scholarship on desistance illuminates the complex personal, interpersonal, social and narrative contexts of criminal careers and their termination and the inherently individualised and interactive nature of these domains in desistance journeys (Weaver 2019; McNeill et al. 2012). Accordingly, it is understood that efforts to support desistance need to be capable of recognising and responding to these interactive domains and subjectivities. In this respect, the desistance literature pays particular attention to the individual desister, constructed as the lead change agent in desistance journeys (Maruna 2001). At the same time, desistance scholarship emphasises the need to look beyond individual-level and corrective approaches to intervention, focussed often on the development of human capital, to support also the development of social capital, that is the interpersonal and social relationships and networks associated with maturation and positive life transitions, including recovery, rehabilitation and re-entry (Weaver 2019). Relatedly, a number of studies underscore that desistance is about more than life transitions, relationships and the acquisition of human and social capital, it is also about the internal and external identity shifts associated with these processes, including the extent to which people with convictions come to see themselves, and come to be seen by others, as citizens worthy of ‘redemption’ and re-entry (Maruna 2001). As Maruna (2017) observes, this alternative theoretical framework has subtle but important implications for criminal justice paradigms and practice, reflecting broader developments and debates in the fields of disability, mental health and substance misuse, and recent movements within these fields towards personalised, peer-led and recovery-based approaches. Like recovery-based approaches, desistance emphasises an appreciative rather than a corrective lens. It focuses on strengths and goals over risks and needs and it privileges relationships over treatment, including but extending beyond the traditional worker-client relationship to encompass also a focus on enabling and repairing relationships with family, peers, employers, communities, civic society and state. This is not to negate the importance of professional relationships in desistance journeys, but it does require us to look more critically at, and beyond, this important relationship, including a willingness to imagine more decentred, empowering and flexible professional contributions (McNeill 2006; Christie 1977). The centrality of co-production to the above described conceptualisation of desistance as both process and outcome is clear. As McNeill (2006, 46) observed more than a decade ago, services seeking to support desistance need to think of themselves ‘less as providers of correctional treatment (that belong to the expert) and more as supporters of desistance processes (that belong to the desister)’. More recently, a number of scholars have suggested that coproduction may provide a framework for mobilising the kind of paradigmatic shift which many consider is required within criminal and social justice systems if desistance is to be supported and not obstructed by existing public service frames (Fox and Marsh 2016; McNeill 2006). This is a promising if overdue

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development in the criminological and desistance literatures. Despite the obvious synergies between these two frameworks, understanding of how coproduction might work to support desistance is significantly underdeveloped (Weaver and McCulloch 2012). Weaver and McCulloch (2012) conducted a review of existing research evidence relating to the concept, practice and value of co-production for criminal justice policy and practice. Our review concluded that, within criminal justice, the concept and practice of co-production had been scarcely analysed, rarely progressed and almost never made subject to robust evaluation. We did however find a number of examples of citizen co-production in criminal justice, including collaborative contributions from people with convictions in: programme delivery, peer education and peer support, mentoring, prison and community councils and forums, user-led organisations and feedback and evaluation research. However, despite clear indicators that involvement in coproductive processes can offer intrinsic benefits for individuals, services and communities, we found little systematic or comparable empirical evidence of the impacts and outcomes of citizen co-production in and across these areas, reflecting, in part, a lack of clarity within the literature about what and how outcomes should be measured. Subsequent studies continue to speak to the potential of co-production in supporting desistance and justice outcomes while at the same time revealing—and often reflecting—an over-reliance on individual level and professionally-centric analyses and applications, that is a preoccupation with questions of what professional actors can do within the traditional worker–service user relationship to better support individual journeys of desistance (McCulloch 2016; Weaver and Nicholson 2012). Relatedly, there is a dominance of academic, policy and professional voices in the extant literature to the extent that we understand very little about how coproductive approaches to desistance are understood and experienced by those directly involved. The study by McCulloch (2016) of user perspectives on co-production, drawing on the experiences of people with convictions, found that though co-production was considered by all participants to be foundational to journeys of desistance, recovery and re-entry, within the confines of criminal justice sanctions it was mostly experienced as a ‘penal imaginary’, that is, an appealing idea that exists mostly in our imagination and is sustained through the negation of less appealing realities and truths (Carlen 2012). In McCulloch’s study, for most, co-production was meaningfully experienced and considered most possible outside of justice sanctions and, importantly, between former or ‘atypical’ offenders and others. To conclude, research in this area is still in its infancy. Emerging findings suggest that co-production is a foundational feature of desistance journeys and holds considerable potential for penal and social reform efforts more broadly. However, existing applications continue to privilege professionally-centric, shallow, individual-level and sustaining co-production modalities which appear to have limited benefits for justice users and stakeholders. In this respect the findings chime with broader critiques of co-production, which speak to the

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limitations of advancing ‘new’ models within traditional service systems and patterns, and the associated harms of reinforcing old orders and inequalities under a refreshed rhetoric of transformation (Walker et al. 2015; Pestoff 2012).

The Role of Peer Support Understanding of the role of peer support in supporting desistance, and justice outcomes more broadly, is limited. There is a small scattering of theoretical and empirical studies which review and evaluate different types of peer practices across prison and, to a lesser extent, community-based settings (South et al. 2017; Perrin and Blagden 2014; Edgar et al. 2011; Dhaliwal and Harrower 2009; Boyce et al. 2009; Devilly et al. 2005). More recently, considerable policy attention has been given across the UK countries and elsewhere to the role of peer mentoring in supporting rehabilitation and resettlement, prompting a small number of new studies in this area (Fletcher and Batty 2012; Hucklesby and Wincup 2014). In this same period, some desistance scholars have begun to shed light on the potential of peer support in supporting desistance outcomes, with attention given to the role of prison listening initiatives (Perrin and Blagden 2014), mutual aid (Weaver 2011), social cooperatives (Weaver 2016) and user-led collectives (Maruna 2017) in this process. Though the above studies speak to the existence, variety and benefits of peer practices within justice contexts, many also reveal a preoccupation with professionally-centric conceptualisations and applications of peer support and a sustained failure to recognise the largely untapped potential of people with convictions in supporting desistance and justice outcomes (Eglash 1958–1959). Peer support practices travel under a variety of terms, reflecting the different types of peer activity being described as well as the different disciplines, traditions and theoretical frameworks within which these activities and terminologies are developing. Within justice, terminology also varies—however, the term ‘peer intervention’ is becoming more widely used, reflecting the development of instrumental conceptualisations of peer support and peer relationships within justice contexts (Fletcher and Batty 2012; Hucklesby and Wincup 2014). My use of the term ‘peer support’ reflects my concern to locate this discussion within broader, interdisciplinary and more critical theoretical frameworks (Riessman et al. 1993), as well as my belief that peer support, properly conceptualised, is a less malleable concept and method than some of the developing alternatives (Mead and MacNeil 2006). Peer support is generally understood as a system of giving and receiving help founded on key principles of respect, shared responsibility and mutual agreement of what is helpful (Mead 2003). It can involve social, emotional, informational and practical support and rests on the understanding that people who have similar experiences can often better relate and consequently offer more authentic empathy and validation (South et al. 2017). In this respect

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peer support can be distinguished from other forms of social support in that the giving and receiving of support rests on an exchange between peers, that is, people who are similar by virtue of shared characteristics or experience. Peer support can take place on an individual, group and collective level and can occur independently of, as well as within and/or alongside, public service systems and services. Over the last decade, there has been a discernible shift towards more ‘co-productive’ constructions and applications of peer support, reflecting increasingly plural patterns of welfare alongside recognition of the value of peer support in supporting personalised public service outcomes (South et al. 2017). This development is not without its critics; scholars across disciplines have argued that the drive to ‘integrate’ peer support within existing service systems presents a number of problems, prompting calls for clearer adherence to what peer support is, and isn’t, if it is to ‘maintain its integrity to the movement from which it came’ (Mead and McNeill 2006, 29). Various typologies of peer support can be found within the extant literature. Davidson and colleagues (1999) distinguish between three broad categories, described as: (i) informal or naturally occurring peer support; (ii) peers participating in user or peer run programmes; (iii) the employment of service users as providers of services and support within traditional services. In their review of ‘offender peer interventions’, Fletcher and Batty (2012, 2) distinguish between two modes, categorised as peer support and peer mentoring, with the former constructed as a ‘passive intervention’ and the latter as a ‘more active role … encompassing advising and helping’. More recently, South and colleagues (2017) developed a typology of prison-based peer interventions which identifies four modes, encompassing: peer education, peer support, peer mentoring and bridging roles. These different categorisations underline the plurality of peer support as a concept and practice, the different kinds of peer to peer and peer-professional relationships within which peer support can occur and the different kinds of outcomes peer support can be used to progress, including individual, system and social outcomes. Below, I discuss three broad and overlapping modes of peer support, aligned to recent developments within criminal justice contexts. Peer Mentoring Peer mentoring is currently the most recognisable form of peer support within justice contexts where it can take the form of peer listening, peer counselling and peer advice. It typically involves the training of people with convictions within prison and community settings to offer support to others with a similar experience. In this model, the peer employed to ‘provide’ support is generally

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considered to be further along in their journey and uses their experience to support others who are at an earlier stage. As Weaver (2011) notes, the value of harnessing the experiences and unique contributions of people with convictions was recognised as early as the 1960s in the United States through the New Careers Movement. At the heart of this government-funded initiative lay the premise that the life experiences of ‘talented but disadvantaged’ and stigmatised people could be put to good use through professional training and employment to work with people with similar backgrounds and experiences. A proportion of these people were people with convictions, some prisoners, who were trained to provide rehabilitative services to other prisoners, while developing skills that they could build on post-release. In the years since, a variety of peer mentoring initiatives have developed internationally which include the recruitment and training of people with convictions to support their peers (Burnett and Maruna 2006). Across the UK, well known and wide-spread initiatives include: prison listener schemes (Dhaliwal and Harrower 2009), peer education initiatives (Devilly et al. 2005), peer advice projects and various ‘Through the Gate’ initiatives (Boyce et al. 2009), which involve the training and employment of ‘former offenders’ to support prisoners in their transition from prison into the community. The recent and rapid rise of paid peer mentoring as an approach to supporting rehabilitation and resettlement represents a particular application of peer support and has seen significant government investment across the UK countries. Here, peer support has developed principally as an individual-level ‘intervention’, focussed on supporting and/or supervising individual journeys of change and resettlement and delivered as part of or as an adjunct to existing service delivery (Fletcher and Batty 2012). However, the recent review by Hucklesby and Wincup (2014) of peer mentoring projects in England raises important questions about the extent to which developing models and applications of paid peer mentoring can reasonably be constructed as peer support. Specifically, the authors highlight that recent applications of peer mentoring within offender management systems rest on an individual deficit model of offending behaviour which is fundamentally at odds with the strengths-based foundations of peer support. Relatedly, they argue that the ‘institutionalising’ of mentoring within existing service systems has created a situation where mentoring largely duplicates existing corrective approaches and priorities such that its distinctive and transformative attributes become stifled. Mutual Aid and Self-help Groups, Including Social Cooperatives There is much less evidence of mutual aid and self-help forms of peer support for people with convictions, at least in the form of small group structures. However, there is developing support for this method among desistance scholars as well as some promising signs in this area, including a scattering of new peer practice initiatives prompted by recent scholarship on desistance, gender-responsive services and trauma-sensitive justice practice (Weaver and

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Lightowler 2017; Maruna 2017; Collica 2010). Further, in the UK and internationally there are a number of mostly nation-wide, user-led collectives for people with convictions, some of which appear also to include local mutual aid structures. Katz and Bender (1976, 5) define mutual aid groups as: voluntary small group structures for mutual aid in the accomplishment of a specific purpose … usually formed by peers who have come together for mutual assistance in satisfying a common need, overcoming a common handicap or life disrupting problem, and bringing about desired social and/or personal change.

Mutual aid rests then on the idea of reciprocal exchange between peers and on the process of relationship, mutuality, exchange and helping as mechanisms for support, recognition and change. Importantly, mutual aid is often associated with the progression of individual as well as group and collective outcomes and, for some marginalised groups, social and political change. Linked to the above, Weaver and Nicholson (2012); Weaver (2016) is currently examining the role that ‘social cooperatives’ might play in supporting desistance and employment. Examining the rise of prisoner social cooperatives within North America and Europe, Weaver and Nicholson (2012, 13) explains: Social co-operatives are democratic organisations owned by their members with equal voting rights. Prisoners co-own and co-control the cooperative together with the other stakeholder members - ex-prisoners, community members and criminal justice and social work professionals.

Social cooperatives thus offer a more inclusive, empowering and collective model of peer support than is typical within justice contexts, with early findings demonstrating their potential for social integration, desistance and resettlement (Weaver 2016). However, as Weaver notes, examples of cooperative structures in the criminal justice system remain rare and unevenly distributed, as are systematic and comparable evaluations of their effectiveness. User-led Communities/Organisations User-led organisations describe organisations and services that are planned, operated, administered and evaluated by service users, former service users and/or communities of interest. Across the UK, UNLOCK (www.unlock. org.uk), User Voice (www.uservoice.org.uk) and Positive Prison: Positive (www.positiveprison.org) are self-governing organisations led by and for people with convictions, with similar communities reported across the United States and Europe (Maruna 2017). Each of the above-noted organisations describes a particular mission and purpose, though all share a commitment to: (i) recognising the experience of people with convictions through

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opportunities for voice, exchange and support; (ii) the provision of practical and emotional support for people with convictions through various forms, including peer support and (iii) the use of members’ shared experience to contribute to individual, system and social change. There is little documented research on the impacts of user-led organisations and communities on journeys of desistance, in part reflecting the fact that few user-led communities construct their identity and activity on these terms. However, Maruna (2017, 14) has recently argued compellingly that the coming ‘third phase’ and real ‘action’ in desistance will move away from academic and professional communities and be centred around grassroots activist and advocacy work from organisations such as those listed above. There are, of course, other peer support modes that work to support desistance that are not reported here. For example, a number of group-based intervention programmes involve ‘former offenders’ in the co-delivery of interventions, though control of these initiatives typically sits with professional providers. Similarly, there are almost certainly naturally occurring peer support networks in operation across prison and community settings that may have much to contribute to our understanding of how and why peer support works, or doesn’t, to support journeys of desistance. Again, a key challenge in understanding these dynamics is that naturally occurring peer support communities are unlikely to identify desistance as an explicit goal or outcome and even less likely to engage in recognisable processes of research (Oliver 1992).

How and Why Peer Support Works to Support Desistance Empirical evidence on the impacts of peer support for people with convictions is light and diffuse. In part this reflects the diverse aims, objectives and methods of peer support within justice contexts and the fact that much of the available ‘evidence’ is hidden within overlapping research literatures, including, for example, empirical studies of desistance, strengths-based approaches and co-production. However, across available studies, peer support has been shown to have benefits for those giving and receiving support, for the organisations within which peer support is situated and for society more broadly (South et al. 2017; Edgar et al. 2011; Frontier Economics 2010; Devilly et al. 2005). Mechanisms of impact appear to correlate broadly with wider research on the theoretical underpinnings of peer support practices, which appear notably consistent across user groups and settings. Salzer and colleagues (2002) identify five theories that underpin peer support, described as: social learning theory, social support, experiential knowledge, the helper principle and social comparison theory. As Solomon (2004) notes, these theories are mostly inferred rather than empirically tested, reflecting the culture of peer support communities and practices that make traditional research methodologies difficult to employ. However, a small number of criminological studies

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are beginning to demonstrate the relevance of these theories to journeys of desistance, some of which are described below. Social learning theory posits that peers, because they have undergone and survived relevant experiences are more credible role models and that interactions with peers who are successfully coping with their experiences are more likely to result in positive change. This theory is now supported by a number of empirical studies which show that peer educators often have enhanced credibility with people with convictions and that peer approaches can contribute to increased legitimacy of support and may be more accessible for marginalised and underserved populations (South et al. 2014; Devilly et al. 2005; Boyce et al. 2009; Whyte 2011). For like reasons, a number of studies indicate that peer-led approaches can result in increased participant knowledge and life skills and can impact positively on participants’ engagement, hope and motivation for change (Rex 1999; Devilly et al. 2005; Boyce et al. 2009). The relationship between social relationships , the development of social capital and desistance is well demonstrated (Weaver 2019; McCulloch 2005; Maruna 2001). Participation in peer roles, relationships and networks has been shown to produce a number of benefits for those giving and receiving support. Dhaliwal and Harrower (2009) found that peer ‘providers’ reported significant personal growth, increased esteem and confidence. Similarly, Devilly and colleagues (2005) found that the atmosphere of trust, mutuality and respect created through peer practices was associated with increases in participants’ sense of self-worth and self-confidence, as well as their sense of autonomy and self-efficacy. A number of studies also speak to social capital gains for participants, including: obtaining a useful qualification, the development of relational, life and work skills and increased employability (Boyce et al. 2009; Burnett and Maruna 2006; Weaver 2016; Edgar et al. 2011; Dhaliwal and Harrower 2009). These and other studies also describe how peer relationships can contribute to reduced stigma and to an improved sense of connectedness to others, to communities and to society more broadly (Morrison et al. 2006). Relatedly, peer practices and relationships have been shown to present important opportunities for people with convictions to develop and practice ‘alternative’ identities and behaviours (Edgar et al. 2011; Boyce et al. 2009; Kelman 1958), so contributing to the kinds of identity shifts associated with desistance (Maruna 2001). Many of the above-noted studies also speak to the significance of the helper principle in journeys of change and desistance. The helper principle describes the benefits that a person experiences through helping others and can include an enhanced sense of interpersonal competence, as well as an enhanced sense of worth and esteem, as experienced through the social approval received from and through those helped. The seminal study by LeBel (2007) of 228 former prisoners found that having a helper orientation had a positive relationship with higher self-esteem and greater satisfaction with life, and a negative relationship with having a criminal attitude and the forecast of re-arrest. LeBel’s findings are supported by a number of other desistance studies which indicate

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that taking responsibility for and/or contributing to the life and well-being of others, whether through family relationships, employment, volunteering or peer initiatives, is positively associated with desistance (Sampson and Laub 1993; Uggen and Janikula 1999; Maruna 2001). A number of studies also indicate that helping others, often discussed as ‘generativity’ within the desistance literature, can contribute to reduced stigma (Wahl 1999) and a sense of personal and social ‘redemption’, that is the personal and social process of making up for one’s wrong doing by working to help others (Maruna 2001). Examined more broadly, many of the above findings also underline the need to develop a more co-productive understanding of the outcomes of peer support, a process that is critical to our ability to understand and measure impact. Importantly, a number of studies also speak to the limitations, tensions and costs of developing applications of peer support, including for those involved. The systematic review by Levenson and Farrant (2002) of peer practices within prisons concluded that opportunities for participation in peer activities only exist for a minority of prisoners. This appears to reflect both a failure within the UK prison system to recognise and engage with prisoners as citizens, as well as the reinforcement of existing social hierarchies and exclusions within criminal justice systems (see also Edgar et al. 2011). Relatedly, Burnett and Maruna (2006) describe the tensions associated within innovation in this area, chief among which they conclude are issues of risk aversion and public trust. Their study also highlights that becoming a peer co-producer can have significant drawbacks as well as benefits, including the process of criminal re-labelling that can occur for citizens taking on these roles. My own narrative research on co-production with people with convictions echoes and adds to these messages (McCulloch 2016). Though most citizen co-producers were positive and sometimes passionate about advancing co-production and peer practices within criminal justice settings, they also described significant obstacles and costs, including: limited meaningful opportunity for peer practices; issues of capacity; reinforcement of existing hierarchies, experiences of re-labelling, stigma and exclusion, and for some, a sense of stagnancy and diminishing returns. In this study, the pains of peer practices were particularly acute in ‘institutional’ and individual-level initiatives and point again to the limitations of individual-level, shallow and sustaining approaches to co-production and peer support.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that desistance needs to be understood as an individual, relational and social process. Relatedly, I have argued that coproduction needs to be understood as a foundational feature of professional efforts to support desistance. In this respect, co-production needs to move from being an interesting idea in desistance theory and practice and become a key concept and criteria. I have argued that development and innovation in this area must transcend the tendency towards professionally-centric, individuallevel and sustaining co-production modalities, towards the advance of user-led,

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group and collective forms. This requires a clearer understanding of the interdependence of individual, group and collective co-production in efforts to support desistance, and a willingness to invest in and experiment with more inclusive, empowering and disruptive forms (Pestoff 2012). The state, professional communities and civic society have important roles to play in supporting desistance but, as argued across a number of studies, the central protagonists in this story must become desisters themselves. Advancing co-production on the above terms will require clearer articulation of what co-production means within justice contexts, including attention to underpinning theoretical frameworks, core principles, associated processes, desired outcomes and mechanisms of measurement, all of which need to be advanced through genuinely co-productive relationships and processes. Criminal justice is some way from constructing its identity and activity in and on these terms. Further, empirical studies of efforts towards a more coproductive identity and practice reveal significant challenges. However, this kind of transformational system change is taking place within related public service areas—including within health, disability, mental health and substance misuse services—prompted and enabled by social movements which are gradually rewriting the rules of play. There is much that we need to learn from these comparative movements about how to enable and advance transformational change within conservative and often coercive public service contexts (Mladenov 2016). One of the common and most interesting levers for change within the above-noted movements, has been the rise of peer support and peer activism as a mechanism for individual, social and system change, epitomised, as Mead and MacNeil (2006) observe, in the Independent Living Movement. It is this kind of user-led, collective, rights-based, paradigm-changing, empowered, empowering and advocacy-oriented construction of peer support that is relevant to our discussion here. As research and history demonstrates, the transformational value of peer support does not reside in its ability to replicate and reproduce existing social and public service systems and relationships, but in its ability to disrupt and transform them, including from the bottom up. A key challenge for would-be professional co-producers in this dynamic, as Christie (1977) observed more than four decades ago, is to work out how to enable and support this necessarily peer-led movement without monopolising the handling of it. Again, this requires a more critical engagement with what peer support is and isn’t, including attention to supporting theoretical frameworks, core principles, associated processes, desired outcomes and mechanisms of measurement. It will also require professional co-producers to give greater attention to the system and social conditions, networks and relationships within which peer support can emerge and flourish as a genuinely co-productive endeavour. These are important messages for professional coproducers, as an increasing number of empirical studies shed light on the ‘cons’ of co-production, including peer practices, within existing criminal justice and public service relationships.

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To conclude, there are multiple routes to advancing co-production in efforts to support desistance, each of which will produce differing outcomes. In this chapter I have argued for the advance of user-led, group and collective forms, reflecting a critical questioning of the reliance within public services and systems, and to some extent scholarly debate, on traditional levers for change which, while important, are rarely transformative (McCulloch and Smith 2017). Grappling with similar challenges of real world transformation, McAra (2017) argues that to achieve impact criminologists need to evolve multi-level strategies for engagement that recognise the inter-relationships between (i) political strategy, (ii) institutional performance and (iii) embodied practice. Each of these elements is pertinent to our discussion here. While, for McAra, embodied practice speaks to the ways in which criminal justice is experienced by its service users, it might also be used to describe and imagine the ways in which user, citizen and professional co-producers, individually and collectively, can take ownership of, embody and advance co-production as a mechanism for system and social transformation.

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McAra, L. (2017). Can criminologists change the world? Critical reflections on the politics, performance and effects of criminal justice. The British Journal of Criminology, 57 (4), 767–788. McCulloch, T. (2005). Probation, social context and desistance: Retracing the relationship. Probation Journal, 52 (1), 8–22. McCulloch, T. (2016). Co-producing justice sanctions? Citizen perspectives. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 16 (4), 431–451. McCulloch, T. & Smith, M. (2017). Creating spaces for change: Engaging civil society to harness change in criminal justice practice. European Journal of Probation, 9 (3), 231–247. McNeill, F. (2006). A desistance paradigm for offender management. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 6 (1), 37–60. McNeill, F., Farrall, S., Lightowler, C. & Maruna, S. (2012). How and why people stop offending: Discovering desistance, Insight 15. IRISS. https://www.iriss. org.uk/resources/insights/how-why-people-stop-offending-discovering-desistance. Accessed 6 March 2020. Mead, S. (2003). Defining peer support. http://www.mentalhealthpeers.com/pdfs/ DefiningPeerSupport.pdf. Accessed 6 March 2020. Mead, S. & MacNeil, C. (2006). Peer Support: What makes it unique? International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, 10 (2), 29–37. Mladenov, T. (2016). Disability and social justice. Disability & Society, 31 (9), 1226– 1241. Morrison, W., Doucet, C. & Murray, J. L. (2006). Ex-offenders as peer volunteers: Promising practices for community-based programmes. Knowledge Development Centre. Oliver, M. (1992). Changing the social relations of research production? Disability, Handicap and Society, 7 (2), 101–114. Ostrom, E. (1996). Crossing the great divide: Coproduction, synergy, and development. World Development, 24 (6), 1073–1087. Parks, R. B., Baker, P. C., Kiser, L., Oakerson, R., Ostrom, E., Ostrom, V., Percy, S. L., Vandivort, M. B., Whitabker, G. P. & Wilson, R. (1981). Consumers as coproducers of public services: Some economic and institutional considerations. Policy Studies Journal, 9 (7), 1001–1011. Perrin, C. & Blagden, N. (2014). Accumulating meaning, purpose and opportunities to change ‘drip by drip’: The impact of being a listener in prison, Psychology, Crime & Law, 20 (9), 902–920. Pestoff, V. (2012). Innovations in public services: Co-production and new public governance in Europe. In A. Botero, A. Paterson & J. Saad-Sulonen (eds) Towards peer production in public services: Cases from Finland. Helsinki, Finland. https:// aaltodoc.aalto.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/11830/isbn9789526046631.pdf? sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed 6 March 2020. Pestoff, V., Brandsen, T. & Verschuere, B. (eds) (2012). New public governance, the third sector and co-production. London: Routledge. Rex, S. (1999). Desistance from offending: Experiences of probation. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 36 (4), 366–383. Riessman, F. B., Bay, T. & Madara, E. J. (1993). The politics of self-help. Social Policy, 23 (2), 28–38.

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Salzer, M. (2002). Consumer-delivered services as a best practice in mental health care and the development of practice guidelines. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Skills, 6 (3), 355–382. Sampson, R. J. & Laub, J. (1993). Crime in the making: Pathways and turning points through life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Solomon, P. (2004). Peer support/Peer provided services: Underlying processes, benefits and critical ingredients. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal, 27 (4), 392–401. South, J., Bagnall, A., Hulme, C., Woodall, J., Longo, R., Dixey, R., Kinsella, K. Raine, G., Vinall-Collier, K. & Wright, J. (2014). A systematic review of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of peer-based interventions to maintain and improve offender health in prison settings. Health Services and Delivery Research, 2 (35). https://doi.org/10.3310/hsdr02350. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate. net/publication/275365554_A_systematic_review_of_the_effectiveness_and_costef fectiveness_of_peer_education_and_peer_support_in_prisons. South, J., Bagnall, A. & Woodall, J. (2017). Developing a typology for peer education and peer support delivered by prisoners. Journal of Correctional Health Care, 23 (2), 214–229. Uggen, C & Janikula, J. (1999). Volunteerism and arrest in the transition to adulthood. Social Forces, 78, 331–362. Wahl, O. F. (1999). Mental health consumers’ experience of stigma. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 25, 467–478. Walker, E., McQuarrie, M. & Lee, C. (2015). Rising participation and declining democracy In C. Lee, M. McQuarrie & E. Walker (eds) Democratizing inequalities: Dilemmas of the new public participation (pp. 3–24). New York: NYU Press. Weaver, B. (2011). Co-producing community justice: The transformative potential of personalisation for penal sanctions. British Journal of Social Work, 41 (6), 1038– 1057. Weaver, E. (2016). Coproducing desistance from crime: The role of social cooperative structures of employment. ECAN Bulletin, 2016 (28), 12–24. Weaver, B. (2019). Understanding desistance: A critical review of theories of desistance. Psychology, Crime & Law, 25 (6), 641–658. Weaver, B. & Lightowler, C. (2017). The women’s centre programme, thematic summary: Issue 1, 2017. https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/822 75443/Weaver_Lightowler_CYCJ_2017_The_womans_centre_programme_the matic_summary.pdf. Accessed 6 March 2020. Weaver, B. & McCulloch, T. (2012). Co-producing criminal justice: Executive summary. Research Report no. 5. Glasgow: The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Co-pro ducing_Criminal_Justice.pdf. Accessed 6 March 2020. Weaver, B. & Nicholson, D. (2012). Co-producing change: Resettlement as a mutual enterprise. Prison Service Journal, 204, 9–16. Whyte, B. (2011). Evaluation of routes out of prison: Final Report. https://www.res earch.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/12602092/Evaluation_of_Routes_out_of_Prison.pdf. Accessed 6 March 2020.

PART VII

Co-assessment of Public Services and Outcomes

CHAPTER 22

Co-assessment Through Digital Technologies Benjamin Y. Clark

Brandsen and Honingh (2016, p. 431) have defined co-production as ‘a relationship between a paid employee of an organization and (groups of) individual citizens that requires a direct and active contribution from these citizens to the work of the organization’. This chapter explores a specific variety of co-production—co-assessment (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013). Nabatchi et al. (2017, p. 772) describe co-assessment as being focused ‘on monitoring and evaluating public services’ where ‘state and lay actors work together to assess service quality, problems, and/or areas for improvement’. These assessments are largely retrospective—looking at ‘activities that have already taken place’— with some prospective elements that are looking to improve future services (Nabatchi et al. 2017, p. 772). These can be very service specific, while co-assessment sometimes looks at the quality of local governance and the achievement of outcomes through non-service mechanisms (e.g. encouraging behaviour change). For example, as Bovaird and Loeffler (2013, p. 11) have noted, ‘it is important that co-assessment explores people’s views of local governance issues and customer care practices, as well as the outcomes which are achieved’. The computing power that we hold in our pockets in our smartphones and other small internet connected devices has opened up the potential for coproduction in ways that were never before possible. This chapter will explore B. Y. Clark (B) School of Planning, Public Policy and Management, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_22

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Fig. 22.1 Technologically-enabled co-assessment scale

three larger and four small case examples of ways in which advanced information and communication technology (ICT) is being used to aid in the co-assessment phase of co-production. Advanced ICT-enabled co-production can take on a different tone than more traditional co-production. The contributions that one individual makes become less important than one the crowd can do collectively (Brabham 2015; Clark et al. 2016, 2017; Clark and Brudney 2019; Surowiecki 2004). By leveraging small pieces of information from a large number of people, governments can map out problems over a larger geographic and temporal space than they could previously. Broadly, it should be noted that ICT can do more than simply leverage small pieces of information in the co-production context. There are examples of ICT which have been used to create online supportive communities that have allowed for co-production to support social services (Meijer 2011). The level of involvement by citizens in this process will vary across the range of digitally or ICT-enabled co-assessment. This chapter will provide one primary example covering three ranges of involvement in this co-assessment, from what I will call ‘less-active’ to ‘moderately active’ to ‘more active’. Coassessment at the less-active end of the scale, seen in Fig. 22.1, may at times not seem like co-production at all to some—and at times I would tend to agree. But these less actively involved forms of digitally-enabled co-assessment all require some commitment by the participants to share their time and effort, computing power and information with the co-production electronic platform (either run by the public or private sector). The examples I provide require either a periodic consent to participate (Street Bump and MyShake) or a periodic assessment on or of the tool itself (Air Quality Sensors) because the tools may go off-line or require some maintenance by the co-producer. The ‘moderately active’ examples I provide have the potential for two-way learning from both the co-producer teaching the government and the coproducer learning from the platform itself. In both of these examples, the Safest Driver app and Waze, data collected by the apps help to co-produce public safety by providing better monitoring and assessment information for our public roadways. And with both apps, users respond to the information the apps collect and have the potential to change their behaviours, producing less (or at least smoothing out) congestion and safer roads.

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Finally, the ‘more active’ examples in this chapter illustrate how ICT can be a platform for improving management and policy outcomes by providing clear and streamlined channels for collecting data on our public environments. Both the ‘311 app’ and the ‘Landslide Repository’ data portal collect and map different types of problems that the user is actively involved in co-producing. The periodicity of this data-collecting is highly voluntary, so the frequency with which co-producers are participating varies widely, based on the interest or need of that particular user. Across the range of levels of involvement in Fig. 22.1, it is possible to conceive all of these activities happening off-line (away from a smartphone or website), but all of them have been made better with the use of technology. People have been complaining about street potholes to their governments for as long as roads have existed. Apps like ‘Street Bump’ (‘FixMyStreet’ in Europe) or 311 have, however, facilitated the transfer of this information spatially and temporally in ways we simply did not have the capacity for in the era before advanced ICT. An app like MyShake helps to measure better the intensity of earthquakes. Earthquakes have been monitored for nearly 2000 years—the ‘earliest seismoscope was invented by the Chinese philosopher Chang Heng in A.D. 132’ (US Geological Survey 2019). So the concept of measuring how big or long an earthquake occurred has been happening without the advances of smartphones. But what the technologically-enabled co-assessment allows for is again a larger spatial and temporal coverage area that produces better data for better decision making by the leaders that need these data. The remainder of this chapter will provide three in-depth cases across the spectrum of co-producer involvement laid out in Fig. 22.1. Following the cases, the chapter provides a discussion of these cases of technologicallyenabled co-assessment.

Less-Active Co-assessment: Case of Air Quality Monitoring Sensors Background Air quality and the factors that affect it are quite varied. Within a geographic region, the quality and health of the air we breathe can go from pristine to dangerous. The cost of measuring air quality has traditionally been very high, where a single monitoring device might cost $20,000 or more (Masters 2017). As the threat of wildfires continues to spread with populations moving closer and closer to sensitive, fire-prone areas, climate change has exacerbated this risk. Some wildfires can set off and aggravate an array of health problems, most concerningly ‘adverse respiratory outcomes’, like asthma, COPD (Alman et al. 2016), as well as other ailments like heart disease and cardiac arrest (Barn et al. 2016; Dixon and Robertson 2018). The fine particulate matter (also

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commonly referred to as PM 2.5) that air quality monitoring stations are typically looking for is linked to higher rates of mortality and morbidity (Alman et al. 2016; Barn et al. 2016). The risk from this fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke is largely due to the size of the particles which are very small, making them particularly insidious because they can more easily reach deep into the lungs and affect the heart (US EPA, n.d.). Short-term exposure to wildfire smoke has a relatively low risk to the general population, compared to other kinds of air pollution. However, age and current health conditions create considerable variation in how people are affected by wildfire smoke. Particularly vulnerable populations include children, whose lungs are still developing; pregnant women, where foetal health can be affected by exposure; the elderly, who are at higher levels of risk because of a greater likelihood of pre-existing lung or heart condition; respiratory and cardiovascular disease suffers, as smoke from wildfires may worsen their conditions and people of low socio-economic status, as they are less likely to have access to protections from smoke (this might include air filtration systems or HVAC units). Thus having high quality, distributed monitoring to determine where resources should be targeted to get relief to those vulnerable populations becomes very important. Application of Co-assessment Technology In areas across the wildfire-prone western US states, small and relatively inexpensive devices have been deployed to help assess air quality. An example of these sensors that has been deployed is PurpleAir PM2.5 sensors (which can be found online for about $200 per unit). These particulate sensors do not have the sensitivity of those used by regulatory agencies—which cost potentially tens of thousands of dollars (Masters 2017). A distributed approach like Purple Air can cover a broad area with more measurements, looking at the particularities of air quality that might otherwise be hidden with only a handful of measurement devices. These devices are so cheap that the general public can, and does, purchase these devices; PurpleAir has created an open platform for these devices giving the public and governments real-time information on air quality. The traditional measurement of pollution has ‘low spatial and temporal resolutions’ because of their cost (Yi et al. 2015, p. 31394). Those stationary sensors only monitor air quality in static locations that may not fully reflect the nature of pollution or population. On the other hand, Fig. 22.2 shows the hundreds of PurpleAir sensors spread across the Los Angeles metro area, providing a broader reach than one could get from official US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) sanctioned sensors. The dialogue about using distributed technology for air quality takes on several forms. Some sensors, like PurpleAir, are stationary, while others are mobile and might require a special device to be connected to a smartphone (Hasenfratz et al. 2012). The mobile monitoring technology, to date, is more

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Fig. 22.2 Air sensors deployed in and around Los Angeles, California. Green dots = Satisfactory air quality; Yellow dots = Acceptable, but moderate health concerns; Red dot = Potentially hazardous air quality (Map source PurpleAir.com)

active, requiring active involvement by the user to collect and manage the data and its contribution to pollution monitoring (Hasenfratz et al. 2012). Active participation sensors may pose more challenges than stationary sensors in getting consistent participation by users. Stationary sensors are very much a ‘set it and forget it’ contribution to the assessment of local conditions (Hasenfratz et al. 2012). Why Would Citizens Want to Be Involved in Monitoring Air? Since initial deployment in 2015, there are now more than 14,500 PurpleAir sensors worldwide, indicating a widespread appetite to participate in this group of non-governmental air sensors. Why do so many people participate? For one, individuals that suffer regularly from the effects of air pollution have found extra security from knowing about their hyper-local air quality—this provides them with information they need to make decisions about how to abate the effects in real time better than government-run air quality monitoring that may not offer the specific local information they seek (Plautz 2018; Yi et al. 2015). For others, these sensors give people ‘peace of mind’ about what is going on outside their windows (Mayer 2018; Plautz 2018), particularly for those individuals that have been through multiple fire seasons (Mayer 2018). But it is not just those suffering from respiratory diseases that see deploying a distributed and citizen driven-network of sensors as advantageous. Environmental activists and community groups seeking better information on

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pollution from particular industrial activities or roadways have used the sensors as a way to provide better information in decision making and advocacy (Plautz 2018; Yi et al. 2015). Some of these individuals see this participation in the co-assessment of air quality as a ‘civic duty’, or community orientation of co-production, rather than just an inward-facing expression of co-production (Mayer 2018). While air sensors such as PurpleAir are not necessarily as consistently accurate as the most expensive sensors, they do provide information in a spatial-temporal manner over vast areas that may not be representative of those where officially sponsored sensor measurement exist. Some see these small sensors as something that ‘could eventually reshape air-pollution regulation, with previously unmeasured areas gathering data on air they say could violate federal health standards’ (Plautz 2018). Equity Concerns While ownership of smartphones has become ubiquitous across nearly all income groups and age groups, the purchase of an air quality sensor probably has not. Air quality, however, does not discriminate where it goes, particularly wildfire smoke. So then the question becomes, are the PurpleAir sensors distributed equitably across communities or are they more likely to be located in wealthy areas? There has not been a large scale study of PurpleAir or other mini-air sensors that I know of, so I have done a quick study of two areas to illustrate the potential and peril of this type of public participation in co-assessment. The first region I looked at was my own, Lane County, Oregon. Lane County is home to nearly 380,000 people. The city of Eugene is found in Lane County and has a population of a little more than 150,000 residents. The city is located at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, in a three-sided bowl which can create sustained air quality issues as the dirty air struggles to find a way out. The Lane Regional Air Protection Agency (LRAPA) regulates air quality and provides local monitoring of air quality with eight large and expensive air sensors. LRAPA was awarded a grant to fund the purchase and installation of PurpleAir monitors in collaboration with several school districts in and around Eugene. As a consequence, nearly every PurpleAir sensor in Eugene was purchased by a governmental agency, rather than citizens, and consequently would not be considered co-assessment. Because schools are located in rich and poor areas, one would expect that their location would be more distributed across all socio-economic groups. Doing a simple t-test of median household income by Census Tracts that have PupleAir devices in them compared to those that do not, indicates no statistically significant difference in incomes between these two groups. In Lane County, 24 Census Tracts have PurpleAir devices, while 62 do not.

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In the second quick study, I turned my attention to Los Angeles County, California. Los Angeles is the second-largest US city, with a population of nearly 3.8 million residents, while 9.8 million live in Los Angeles County. Clearly, from a population standpoint, Los Angeles County, California and Lane County, Oregon are quite different. The placement of PurpleAir sensors is more widespread and more common in Los Angeles County. But without empirical evidence, it is hard to know who these sensors are serving. In the case of Los Angeles County, doing the same simple t-test of median household income by Census Tracts that have PupleAir devices in them compared to those that do not, indicates a statistically significant difference in incomes between these two groups. The Census Tracts with PurpleAir devices have an average median household income that is $14,992 higher than those that do not ($78,717 compared to $63,725). In a case like this, where co-assessment is not happening evenly and is skewing towards wealthier neighbourhoods, governments need to be cautious about the actions of the type they take in response to these sensors. If they are providing extra services or actions in areas simply because they has better monitoring information, the equity concerns need to be raised and the issue addressed.

Less-Active Co-production Mini-Case Examples MyShake: MyShake is a mobile application developed by the University of California which provides and receives information on earthquakes. A user can get alerts from specified geographies on the location and magnitude of earthquakes. The co-assessment feature of MyShake is how it uses the mobile phone’s internal gyroscopes and accelerometers to have hyper-local and distributed detection and monitoring of earthquake shaking. The app runs in the background on users’ phones and has been programmed to ignore the everyday movements of the users, with a specific focus on picking up tremors from earthquakes. Street Bump: The Street Bump app takes a similar approach to potholes that MyShake takes to earthquakes. Developed in coordination with the City of Boston Office of New Urban Mechanics, this application runs in the background of users’ mobile phones and tries to detect bumps and potholes in the roadways using the phone’s internal gyroscopes and accelerometers. As phone users drive around the city, their phones pick up the same ‘bump’ in the road. After a pre-determined number of bumps are detected in the same location, a road crew can be dispatched to fix the road.

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Moderately Active Co-assessment: Case of the Safest Driver App Background Nearly 40,000 deaths occur on US roadways each year, and that number is increasing. One particularly dangerous city for driving is Boston, MA (Allstate Insurance Company 2018; Cities of Service 2018). In response to traffic and pedestrian fatalities, the City of Boston has passed a Vision Zero plan to improve the safety of their roadways for all Bostonians. ‘Vision Zero is an international movement to set a goal of zero traffic deaths or serious collisions by 2030’ (Cities of Service 2018). As well as beginning to make changes to infrastructure and signage to slow cars (the City Council lowered speed limits to 25 mph. in 2017), the city is taking a new approach to improve drivers’ behaviour—gamifying and engaging the public with a safe driving competition (Cities of Service 2018). They developed a mobile phone app called ‘Boston’s Safest Driver’ which tracks the driving behaviour of contestants and ranks them with others in the contest. Application of Co-assessment Technology The Safest Driver app takes inspiration from devices that insurance companies have been using to give safe drivers discounts on insurance rates. Those devices plug into a car’s monitoring portal and send periodic feedback to the insurer on speed and braking habits. Mobile tech firms, seeing a similar opportunity to use smartphones to perform a similar task developed the app with the city as part of their plan to implement Vision Zero. The app allows for the assessment and monitoring of driving habits, sends that feedback to the driver and shares results with the city and other drivers (Cities of Service 2018). The app and web contest site have a leader board showing the city’s best drivers. Participants even have the opportunity to engage and link up with their friends to have friendly competitions to see who is a better driver (Cities of Service 2018). Participants in this safe driving contest are using both their active enrolment through the gaming and feedback loops on their driving, with passive monitoring of their driving while they are in motion. One participant in Boston noted that ‘she was surprised at first by some of the behaviours that reduced her score, like cornering too quickly. She began to pay a lot more attention to the subtly changing speed limits throughout the city, and she stopped texting while driving’ (Cities of Service 2018). The city of San Antonio, which rolled out its Safer Driver app a couple of years after Boston, has seen similar results (Cities of Service 2018). Boston was able to see ‘the gamification of safe driving push adoption and change behavior’ (Cities of Service 2018). People were responding to their improving or declining driving scores by changing their behaviour for the

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better. Though they noted that they did not want to make the users situation ever seem like a ‘lost cause’ by giving them too low a score, resulting in the app getting deleted, so they pushed towards a goal of people thinking that ‘there is room for improvement’ (Cities of Service 2018). The data the app generated ‘showed that in the first weeks of the contest, participants’ driving behavior improved. As the weeks went by, some participants returned to their old ways, but the top scorers in the contest continued to demonstrate safer driving habits’ (Biediger 2018; Montalvo 2018). In Boston ‘speeding was reduced by 35 percent, and distracted driving was reduced by 47 percent’ (Cambridge Mobile Telematics 2017) and similar, though less dramatic, results have been seen in other cities (Fucoloro 2018). Consequently, the monitoring and assessment data serves not only help the city in planning and management of Vision Zero goals but also provide a self-efficacy feedback loop for the participants. The importance of self-efficacy in co-production has been covered in other works (Bovaird et al. 2015; Clark and Brudney, in press; Staples et al. 1998; Thomsen 2017). It plays a role in keeping people engaged, which is demonstrated with these apps. Co-production through these apps is not focused solely on co-assessment or monitoring of issues. It is clear that one could describe the action of drivers to improve the quality and safety of driving as helping to co-deliver public safety. Why Would Citizens Want to Be Involved in a Driving Contest? The applications and devices to monitor and assess driving dangers given out by insurance companies typically come with monetary incentives for the users—they get lower rates by giving up some of their personal information to the companies. Participating in a city-sponsored driving competition, as enabled by these apps, offers some opportunities for cash prizes. For example, in Boston participants are competing for more than $25,000 (Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics 2019). Participants can win from a pool of more than $60,000 in prizes in San Antonio (Montalvo 2018) or nearly $8000 in Seattle (Schwartz 2019). The Safest Driver apps also offer participants the chance to compete against friends and family. You can gain a sense of accomplishment by being the best driver in your family or circle of friends. For example, one Boston participant described how he took safe driving ‘very seriously’ and he used the Safest Driver app to ‘prove it’ to himself and others (Cities of Service 2018). Another participant in the Boston programme spoke about the value of the data he was producing and the pride he felt by participating, stating that ‘I felt a personal investment’ (Cities of Service 2018). These data, he felt, would help to improve ‘city analysis and policymaking’ and that this ‘app was a type of civic action, although he does not participate in many other traditional civic activities’ (Cities of Service 2018). This outward-facing or collective sense of co-production (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013; Nabatchi et al. 2017) benefits more than just the individual who is driving better and gets to brag to friends

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and family—it also provides the community with a safer driver that reduces the risks to all around them. Tapping into this collective behaviour was one of the keys that Boston’s Mayor Walsh sought to influence through the Safest Driver initiative: ‘To achieve our Vision Zero goals, we need to work together as a community to change the culture of our streets’ (Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics 2019). On the downside, the ICT-enabled co-assessment data that were collected, and which were a source of civic pride to the individuals, could pose a risk to them if they were released. To encourage participation and ensure data protections, Boston, Seattle and San Antonio (the three cities that have used Safest Driver) all limit the amount of and types of data they directly collect and maintain. The creator of the app, Cambridge Mobile Telematics, holds all of the data and gives summary, aggregated, and anonymized data to the city. One Boston official noted that ‘Our duty to the public was to offer a tool for self-reflection, not a tool for enforcement or embarrassment’ (Cities of Service 2018), so the programme did not include people’s names, but rather just a user name that the participant could choose—no demographic information was collected beyond a postal code and an email address. The city could then use anonymized data generated by the app to help improve roadway safety. These cities can use the data to better understand when and where drivers were likely to use their mobile devices while operating their vehicles. They could see in which areas people were more likely to speed and which corners they were likely to take too aggressively. These kinds of assessment and monitoring data are helping the city better manage its Vision Zero programme and improve safety for all of its residents (Vision Zero SF 2017). This is one of the ways that assessment and monitoring information turns into the co-production of public safety. Equity Concerns Unlike the case of the PurpleAir sensors, Smartest Driver does not cost the participant money to be part of the co-production process—at least not directly. However, owning and operating a car can be cost-prohibitive, thereby potentially excluding a portion of the population. Before the start of the Safest Driver contest, Boston enacted policies and investments to reduce driving in the city and encourage non-car trips (Cities of Service 2018). Consequently, ‘Boston’s Safest Driver also awarded users badges for trips without a car’ to align better with these policies (Cities of Service 2018). Moreover, while 95% of adults in the US own a mobile phone, only 77% have smartphones (Pew Reserch Center 2018). Excluding up to 23% of the adult population is clearly a potential equity issue for a programme of this nature. An additional concern is use of an app that is data-reliant, so that some users on pre-paid mobile phone plans may be excluded from participating because of data use limits. While the implementation of a contest as a way to encourage the co-production of public safety and the co-assessment of roadway dangers is admirable and justifiable,

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the potential exclusion of non-drivers, non-smartphone users, or limited data plans should be a consideration in structuring alternative rewards for these groups to assure a more equitable outcome.

Moderately Active Co-production: Waze Mini-Case Waze: Waze is a popular mobile application, owned by Alphabet/Google, that provides a driver with a map for navigation. Simultaneously, Waze provides other drivers with information on local roadway speed and congestion— thereby co-assessing the roadway conditions in real time in ways that local, regional, or national departments of transportation would otherwise struggle to do. The app itself helps to redirect drivers around the congestion, more efficiently using the public infrastructure (though plenty of cities and neighbourhoods do not always appreciate this more ‘efficient’ use of roadways, when traffic increases on once-sleepy streets). This is the feature of Waze that could be considered a passive way in which to provide co-assessment because once the user activates the app it provides a stream of data with no further action by the users. Cities can leverage the active form of co-assessment arising from Waze by drawing on the reports of broken-down vehicles, potholes, debris on the roadway, or other hazards, and gathering information on areas of congestion to create better transportation and city plans.

More Active Co-assessment: 311 Background For more than 40 years the city government of Oklahoma City has had a single phone number to call to resolve or report all non-emergency issues. Creating a one-stop phone number to ease the struggle of getting local government problems resolved took off in great numbers during the latter half of the 1990s. It follows in the footsteps of the revolution of 911 call centres, the onestop number for government emergency response (fire, police and ambulance services) at the local level across much of the US. The 311 direct service number for non-emergency local government response came about in 1996 in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore hoped not only to provide a streamlined path for citizens to get the information and services they needed by not having to look up separate departmental numbers for each issue but also to save money by diverting calls away from more the more costly 911 call centres. The results in Baltimore were quite impressive—$100 million in savings in the first three years (Bontis 2007). The advent of 311 in cities has moved rapidly from just call centres to wider ICT-based forms of solving the non-emergency problems that 311 was set up to solve, both web-based and on smartphones. Web-based reporting and informational portals began from the late 1990s. Smartphone applicationbased 311 started shortly after the advent of the first smartphone applications.

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Fig. 22.3 % of cities in the sample with 311 systems (by type) (Source Author’s data collection)

Figure 22.3 shows the adoption rate of different forms of 311 reporting. The sample of cities in Fig. 22.3, including 122 of the largest US cities, shows very rapid adoption of web-based 311, surpassing the number of cities with call centres in 2010. In 2016 more than 60% of these sample cities have web-based 311 reporting portals. The advent of the smartphone has further enabled cities to leverage co-assessment through 311. It is clear from Fig. 22.3 that the speed at which cities adopted smartphone apps for 311 was the quickest of all three modes of 311 reporting. The first known 311 smartphone app was released in 2008 but by 2016 it was provided by 40% of sample cities. Many cities have more than one mode of collecting the information for 311 and may include combinations of phone, web and mobile applications. Application of Co-assessment Technology Using 311 as a means of co-production and assessment has been a topic in the literature in recent years (Chatfield and Reddick 2017; Clark et al. 2013, 2020; Clark and Brudney 2019, in press; Clark and Guzman 2017; Clark and Shurik 2016; Gao 2017; Hartmann 2019; Hartmann et al. 2017; Hong et al. 2019; Minkoff 2016; O’Brien 2015, 2016a, b; Schwester et al. 2009; White and Trump 2018). As a means of assessing problems across time and space, 311 offers cities government managers ‘the next best way to taking all of his citizens’ calls himself’—as former San Francisco Mayor Newsom was known to describe 311 (Clark and Brudney, in press). Figure 22.4 shows how a city or neighbourhood-level government manager, in this case, San Francisco’s Mission District, might be able to use

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Fig. 22.4 San Francisco 311 reports from 2019

the data generated through 311 reports better to identify hotspots of particular types of problems. Figure 22.4 depicts two possible types of report made via 311, graffiti and abandoned vehicles. Clearly there are areas of consistent concern for both types of problems and other areas that are more periodic. These maps, similar to maps users can create on the city’s own website, provide an assessment not just for public managers but to the general public as well. An individual wishing to move or invest in a neighbourhood would have some of the same data available to them that city managers do, allowing this citizengenerated assessment to serve a broader range of purposes because the city has chosen to make these data open to the public for viewing.

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Why Would Citizens Want to Be Involved in Providing Neighbourhood Assessment and Monitoring? On whole, people use 311 to solve quality of life problems in their cities. They get potholes fixed, broken sidewalks repaired, public trash cans emptied, fallen trees cleaned up and snow ploughed, to name a few of the problems people request help with. The motivators driving participation beyond this includes individual and collective forms of co-production (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013). Some concerns reported via 311 are highly individualistic, where someone is requesting that a problem in front of their home or business be remedied to benefit largely themselves. In one extreme example, the city of Denver limited the number of 311 requests an individual could make because a sidewalk contractor for the city was calling in spurious repair requests to generate more work for his own business. This type of behaviour is exceedingly rare, as most individuals only report a handful, at most, of requests in a given year. On the collective end of the scale, there are even some individuals that have taken on the mantle of a ‘frequent flyer’ or someone who is a hyper-coproducer for their community rather than for themselves (Clark and Brudney, in press; Sharrock 2010; Thomas 2012). The frequent flyer is not a common state for 311 driven co-production, representing only a small share of all coproducers when it is measured—in San Francisco, it was only 5% of those that were 311 users (Clark and Brudney, in press). Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a big advocate for 311 in his city. During hurricanes and major snowstorms he strongly encouraged residents of the city to call 311 for information and reporting problems rather than calling 911—leaving the 911 operators available for actual life-and-death cases, using his bully pulpit to call for ‘collective’ use of 311 in times of emergency. Equity Concerns Colleagues and I have studied several questions surrounding equity and 311. There is a potential that 311 could give better access to government services for those that already have power and privilege in society—mirroring coproduction generally. However, what we have found, looking at a range of demographic characteristics in the areas where service requests come from within the city of Boston, is that there are no systematic biases (Clark et al. 2013). It is conceivable that this is a Boston-specific finding, thus other cities should be examined to test their situation. We also looked at who participates in 311 in the city of San Francisco. We first asked: ‘Are 311-enabled co-producers in San Francisco representative of their city?’ We found that again there was no systematic bias in who was participating (Clark and Brudney 2019). In a follow-up study, we focused on the frequent flyers. Once again we found no systematic biases— frequent flyers were over-represented in many disadvantaged groups rather than underrepresented (Clark and Brudney, in press).

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And finally, we studied how cities respond to 311 requests in 15 different cities around the USA. Across all these cities, we found no substantial evidence of bias in the time it took cities to respond, based on any traditionally disadvantaged group (race, ethnicity, income, or education) (Clark et al. 2020). While some small statistically significant differences in the time taken do exist for some cities in some circumstances, the practical differences between these response times were rarely larger than five minutes on average. These studies are not the end of the story for understanding the equity concerns of 311-enabled co-production. But what they have done is to shed light on how information and communication technology (ICT) enabled coproduction is creating different outcomes from prior generations of more traditional co-production. The research has collectively indicated that, in spirt of fears of disenfranchising citizens through ICT-enabled co-production, it may actually be having the opposite effects in some cases.

Fig. 22.5 Landslide report (Source https://maps.nccs.nasa.gov/apps/landslide_rep orter/)

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More Active Co-production Mini-Case Example: The Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR) Landslides pose threats to people and property around the world. ‘Data on past landslide events guide future disaster prevention, but to date, we do not have a global picture of exactly when and where landslides occur’ (NASA 2019)—this is where COOLR comes in, an online platform set up to track better where landslides are occurring around the world. NASA is leading this effort by ‘building the biggest open global landslide inventory to address this problem’ (NASA 2019) but, like so many other governmental entities, does not itself have the resources to track every relevant incident. By engaging the public in this ‘citizen science’ effort, they can capture a breadth and depth of these phenomenon in ways the agency would never be able to do alone. They draw upon co-assessment efforts to predict better the future risks of landslides by better understanding where they have occurred in the past. Figure 22.5 shows an image of the COOLR reported landslides in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Individuals can download COOLR and report geolocated information on landslides wherever they happen to be in the world. This helps to create a more global and complete map and history of these potentially dangerous and costly events.

Conclusions The discussion of what is or is not co-production has produced several articles in recent years. As co-production ventures into the digitally and technologically-enabled world, how we define these variants of co-production adds to that complexity and ambiguity. Linders (2012), Noveck (2009, 2015) and others have made efforts to help clarify the transition from non-technical to more technical government broadly. Bridging the gap between the inperson and activity-based co-production forms of years past to the ICT-based co-production of today and tomorrow has only just begun. Financial constraints that limit the ability of governments at all levels, from local to national, are pushing the implementation of new ways in which governments are engaging and assessing citizen needs (Lember 2018). However, the advent of these technologically-based efforts is not based on a lack of money alone, but rather on the potential of an expanded reach of programmes and assistance to the public that the technology can enable. Mexico City was able to harness the power of its 14 million daily public transit riders and jointly produce a full-transit map in two weeks through technologically-enabled co-production (Lember 2018), much faster and cheaper than through hiring a group of staff members from the city or transit agency.

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Technology, on its own, will not create a more liveable city. Data produced by the technologies will not on their own make for better decision making. The technology will not alone change behaviours. These technologies and the data they produce alone do not create a more liveable world and yield better outcomes. They need to be attended to, guided and harnessed in the name of the public. The crowd left to its own devices can produce both good and bad results—we need not look further than falsely accused individuals in the wake of the Boston Marathon Bombings for how poorly co-produced police work can turn out (Clark et al. 2017). In that case, several individuals were identified (incorrectly) and threatened by the public, though they had committed no crimes. The promise of co-assessment through technological means has tremendous power to shape society and provide for better services for more people. The examples presented in this chapter, though not an exhaustive list, show a range of potential uses of technology in the co-assessment process. It is useful for governments contemplating the use of technology in co-assessment to recognise that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach. There are different levels of engagement that come with different applications. Some require a very light touch by engaged citizens, while others require much more hands-on attention from the users (and the governments). As governments strive to find ways in which to engage more and more with the people, having an open mind to the potential of cases presented here should help to shape some dialogue and action. At the dawn of the smartphone more than a decade ago, few could conceive the potential they had to create opportunities for co-production. Technological advances in the coming years will likely enable new and different kinds of co-production that we cannot even imagine today.

References Allstate Insurance Company. (2018). Allstate America’s Best Drivers Report. Allstate. https://www.allstate.com/tr/americas-best-drivers.aspx. Accessed 29 May 2019. Alman, B. L., Pfister, G., Hao, H., Stowell, J., Hu, X., Liu, Y., & Strickland, M. J. (2016). The Association of Wildfire Smoke with Respiratory and Cardiovascular Emergency Department Visits in Colorado in 2012: A Case Crossover Study. Environmental Health, 15(1), 64. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-016-0146-8. Barn, P. K., Elliott, C. T., Allen, R. W., Kosatsky, T., Rideout, K., & Henderson, S. B. (2016). Portable Air Cleaners Should Be at the Forefront of the Public Health Response to Landscape Fire Smoke. Environmental Health, 15(1), 116. https:// doi.org/10.1186/s12940-016-0198-9. Biediger, S. (2018). San Antonio’s Safest Drivers Collect $10K Prizes in Vision Zero Contest. Rivard Report. https://therivardreport.com/sas-safest-drivers-collect-10kprizes-in-vision-zero-contest/. Accessed 25 September 2018. Bontis, N. (2007). Citizen Relationship Management in Canadian Cities: Starting to Dial 311. In S. F. Borins, K. Kernaghan, D. Brown, N. Bontis, P., & F. Thompson (Eds.), Digital State at the Leading Edge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2013). We’re All in This Together: Harnessing User and Community Co-Production of Public Outcomes. Birmingham: Institute of Local Government Studies: University of Birmingham, p. 15. Bovaird, T., Van Ryzin, G. G., Loeffler, E., & Parrado, S. (2015). Activating Citizens to Participate in Collective Co-Production of Public Services. Journal of Social Policy, 44(1), 1–23. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.uoregon.edu/10.1017/S00472794 14000567. Brabham, D. C. (2015). Crowdsourcing in the Public Sector. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2016). Distinguishing Different Types of Coproduction: A Conceptual Analysis Based on the Classical Definitions. Public Administration Review, 76(3), 427–435. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12465. Cambridge Mobile Telematics. (2017, December 1). Can Seattle’s ‘Safest Driver’ App Teach People to Drive More Responsibly? Cambridge Mobile Telematics. https:// www.cmtelematics.com/company-news/can-seattles-safest-driver-app-teach-peopledrive-responsibly/. Accessed 29 May 2019. Chatfield, A. T., & Reddick, C. G. (2017). Customer Agility and Responsiveness Through Big Data Analytics for Public Value Creation: A Case Study of Houston 311 On-Demand Services. Government Information Quarterly. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.giq.2017.11.002. Cities of Service. (2018). Case Study: Boston’s Safest Driver. Cities of Service. https:// citiesofservice.org/resource/bostons-safest-driver/. Accessed 29 May 2019. City & County of San Francisco. (2019). Reports. SF311. https://sf311.org/inform ation/reports. Accessed 2 June 2019. Clark, B. Y., Brudney, J., Jang, S. G., & Davy, B. (2020). Do Advanced Information Technologies Produce Equitable Government Responses in Coproduction: An Examination of 311 Systems in 15 US Cities. American Review of Public Administration, 50(3), 315–327. https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074019894564. Clark, B. Y., & Brudney, J. L. (2019). Citizen Representation in City GovernmentDriven Crowdsourcing. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 28(5), 883–910. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-018-9308-2. Clark, B. Y., & Brudney, J. L. (in press). Too Much of a Good Thing? Frequent Flyers and the Implications for the Coproduction of Public Service Delivery. In E. W. Welch (Ed.), Research Handbook on E-Government. United Kingdom: Edward Elgar Publishers. Accessed 28 March 2017. Clark, B. Y., Brudney, J. L., & Jang, S.-G. (2013). Coproduction of Government Services and the New Information Technology: Investigating the Distributional Biases. Public Administration Review, 73(5), 687–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/ puar.12092. Clark, B. Y., & Guzman, T. (2017). Does Technologically Enabled Citizen Participation Lead to Budget Adjustments? An Investigation of Boston, MA, and San Francisco, CA. American Review of Public Administration, 47 (8), 945–961. https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074016642568. Clark, B. Y., & Shurik, M. (2016). Do 311 Systems Shape Citizen Satisfaction with Local Governments? In E. Gibson & P. Julnes (Eds.), Innovations in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors: A Public Solutions Handbook (pp. 147–166). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Clark, B. Y., Zingale, N. C., & Logan, J. (2017). Intelligence and Information Gathering Through Deliberative Crowdsourcing. Journal of Public & Non-Profit Affairs, 3(1), 55–78. Clark, B. Y., Zingale, N., Logan, J., & Brudney, J. L. (2016). A Framework for Using Crowdsourcing in Government. International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age, 3(4), 58–76. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJPADA.2016100105. Dixon, A., & Robertson, K. (2018). Wildland Fire Smoke Effects on Public Health: What Does the Research Say? (No. SFE Fact Sheet 2018-2). Tall Timbers Research Station: Southern Fire Exchange. http://www.southernfireexchange.org/SFE_Pub lications/factsheets/2018-2.pdf. Fucoloro, T. (2018, January 5). Seattle’s ‘Safest Driver’ App Shows Some Promising Results. Seattle Bike Blog. https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2018/01/05/seattlessafest-driver-app-shows-some-promising-results/. Accessed 29 May 2019. Gao, X. (2017). Networked Co-Production of 311 Services: Investigating the Use of Twitter in Five U.S. Cities. International Journal of Public Administration, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2017.1298126. Hartmann, S. (2019). Citizen Relationship Management for Civic Participation: How Smart Cities Use 311 to Involve Citizens. In E-Participation in Smart Cities: Technologies and Models of Governance for Citizen Engagement (pp. 59–77). Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89474-4_4. Hartmann, S., Mainka, A., & Stock, W. G. (2017). Citizen Relationship Management in Local Governments: The Potential of 311 for Public Service Delivery. In Beyond Bureaucracy (pp. 337–353). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-319-54142-6_18. Hasenfratz, D., Saukh, O., Sturzenegger, S., & Thiele, L. (2012). Participatory Air Pollution Monitoring Using Smartphones. Mobile Sensing, 1, 1–5. Hong, A., Kim, B., & Widener, M. (2019). Noise and the City: Leveraging Crowdsourced Big Data to Examine the Spatio-Temporal Relationship Between Urban Development and Noise Annoyance. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2399808318821112. https://doi.org/10.1177/239980831882 1112. Lember, V. (2018). The Increasing Role of Digital Technologies in Co-Production and Co-Creation. In T. Brandsen, T. Steen & B. Vershcuere (eds), Co-Production and Co-Creation (pp. 115–127). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/978 1315204956-16. Linders, D. (2012). From E-Government to We-Government: Defining a Typology for Citizen Coproduction in the Age of Social Media. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 446–454. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2012.06.003. Masters, J. (2017, July 16). PurpleAir’s $250 Air Pollution Monitor Gives Government Equipment Run for Money by Dr. Jeff Masters. Category 6. Weather Underground. https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/purple-airs-250-air-pollution-mon itor-gives-government-equipment-run-money. Accessed 28 May 2019. Mayer, S. (2018, August 18). Grassroots Air Quality Sensors Spreading to Local Neighborhoods. The Bakersfield Californian. https://www.bakersfield.com/news/ grassroots-air-quality-sensors-spreading-to-local-neighborhoods/article_ed3fb8f29683-11e8-8b76-c72ae39ebf9b.html. Accessed 28 May 2019. Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. (2019, May 1). Boston’s Safest Driver Competition. Boston.gov. https://www.boston.gov/departments/new-urban-mec hanics/bostons-safest-driver-competition. Accessed 29 May 2019.

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Meijer, A. (2011). Networked Coproduction of Public Services in Virtual Communities: From a Government-Centric to a Community Approach to Public Service Support. Public Administration Review, 71(4), 598–607. https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1540-6210.2011.02391.x. Minkoff, S. L. (2016). NYC 311 A Tract-Level Analysis of Citizen–Government Contacting in New York City. Urban Affairs Review, 52(2), 211–246. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1078087415577796. Montalvo, M. (2018, June 5). CoSA, USAA Launch “S.A. Safest Driver” Contest to Change Motorists’ Habits. News Radio 1200 WOAI . https://woai.iheart.com/ content/2018-06-05-are-you-the-safest-driver-in-metro-san-antonio/. Accessed 29 May 2019. Nabatchi, T., Sancino, A., & Sicilia, M. (2017). Varieties of Participation in Public Services: The Who, When, and What of Coproduction. Public Administration Review, 77 (5), 766–776. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12765. NASA. (2019). LANDSLIDES @ NASA. landslides.nasa.gov. https://pmm.nasa.gov/ landslides/index.html. Accessed 4 June 2019. Noveck, B. S. (2015). Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Noveck, B. S. S. (2009). Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Washington: Brookings Institution Press. O’Brien, D. (2015). Custodians and Custodianship in Urban Neighborhoods: A Methodology Using Reports of Public Issues Received by a City’s 311 Hotline. Environment and Behavior, 47 (3), 304–327. https://doi.org/10.1177/001391 6513499585. O’Brien, D. (2016a). Lamp Lighters and Sidewalk Smoothers: How Individual Residents Contribute to the Maintenance of the Urban Commons. American Journal of Community Psychology, 58(3–4), 391–409. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12093. O’Brien, D. (2016b). Using Small Data to Interpret Big Data: 311 Reports as Individual Contributions To Informal Social Control in Urban Neighborhoods. Social Science Research, 59, 83–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2016.04.009. Pew Reserch Center. (2018, February 5). Demographics of Mobile Device Ownership and Adoption in the United States. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewinternet. org/fact-sheet/mobile/. Accessed 1 June 2019. Plautz, J. (2018, July 9). Air-Quality Measurement Goes DIY. CityLab. https:// www.citylab.com/environment/2018/07/cheap-sensors-are-democratizing-air-qua lity-data/563990/. Accessed 28 May 2019. Schwartz, A. (2019, May 9). Seattle’s Safest Driver—Transportation. seattle.gov. http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/safety-first/visionzero/safest-driver. Accessed 29 May 2019. Schwester, R. W., Carrizales, T., & Holzer, M. (2009). An Examination of the Municipal 311 System. International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, 12(2), 218–236. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOTB-12-02-2009-B003. Sharrock, J. (2010). Hello Operator. The Bold Italic—San Francisco. http://theboldit alic.com/justine/stories/512-hello-operator. Accessed 3 February 2011. Staples, D. S., Hulland, J. S., & Higgins, C. A. (1998). A Self-Efficacy Theory Explanation for the Management of Remote Workers in Virtual Organizations. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3(4). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101. 1998.tb00085.x.

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CHAPTER 23

Co-assessment Through Citizens and Service Users in Audit, Inspection and Scrutiny Dave Mckenna

Introduction The topic of co-assessment in audit, inspection and scrutiny can be described as uncharted territory for a number of reasons. While these functions are a vital component of public administration, they have been less exposed to the principles and practice of co-production than other aspects of public services. This means that, in practice, there are very few examples of co-assessment which can be observed in audit, inspection and scrutiny. There are, of course, many examples of public engagement and many of those working in these functions are keen to hear the views of the public. These initiatives, however, tend to be top-down consultation and engagement rather than the radical form of collaborative arrangement that characterises co-production (Bovaird 2007). As Cope and Goodship argue: ‘despite the rhetoric of getting the public more involved, users of public services have very little say within regulatory regimes of policy sectors’ (2002, 38). At the same time, co-assessment is something of a Cinderella compared to co-design, co-commissioning and co-delivery and is the least considered of these four stages of co-production in the literature (Loeffler 2021). In summary, then, co-assessment in these formal mechanisms for evaluating public bodies is something of a new frontier. This purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to shine a light on the concepts and practice of co-assessment as they apply, and as they might be applied, to the audit, inspection and scrutiny of public services. It considers the potential D. Mckenna (B) Swansea University and Centre for Public Scrutiny, Swansea, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_23

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benefits for using co-assessment and how co-assessment might be applied at each of the five stages of the assessment process. Following this it considers the barriers that might be responsible for the current low levels of co-assessment observed in practice. It concludes with a discussion of future opportunities in the context of new digital and social technologies. First, however, it is important to say something about audit, inspection and scrutiny as they operate now in order to lay the foundations for the discussion that follows. Please note that, while the focus here is primarily on the UK experience, the aim is to provide international relevance where possible.

Audit, Inspection and Scrutiny in Public Services Audit, inspection and scrutiny together form a ‘professional accountability function’ that operates in addition to the democratic accountability of elections (Levitt et al. 2010). Traditionally, these assessment functions are intended to ensure that public services work to acceptable standards of performance and probity and this remains fundamental to their role. Significantly, these functions are additional to, and separate from, the performance monitoring and self-assessment that service providers conduct themselves. While audit, inspection and scrutiny operate under a shared umbrella, they do have distinct functions. In addition, the terms audit, inspection and scrutiny (along with regulation) must be used carefully as they can mean different things in different contexts and are often used interchangeably (Boyne et al. 2002). The following definitions proposed by Levitt et al. (2010), however, provide a useful starting point for the discussion here (Box 23.1): Box 23.1 Definitions of audit, inspection and scrutiny Audit Periodic external assessment of corporate governance and management systems, financial statements and underlying financial systems, and the performance, performance management and reporting of public bodies. Inspection Periodic, targeted assessment of specific services, to check whether they are meeting national and local performance standards, legislative and professional requirements and the needs of service users. Scrutiny Public inquiry into aspects of (national or local) government policy and performance, initiated and undertaken by a group of elected members. Source Levitt et al. (2010, 4).

In practice audit, inspection and scrutiny are conducted by a range of organisations with different regimes operating in the different devolved administrations of the UK and for different public service bodies. Between them these organisations offer a mix of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ arrangements which in practice map out as follows:

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• Audit typically has both an internal and external component so, for example, local authorities in the UK will have internal audit functions overseen by audit committees consisting of a mix of elected and lay members. In addition, they will have external auditors such Audit Scotland, the Wales Audit Office and the Northern Ireland Audit Office (local authorities in England appoint their own external auditors); • Inspection is typically an external function with separate bodies in the different devolved administrations conducting inspections for a range of service areas including education, health, social services and different aspects of local government. Health inspections, for example, are carried out by the Care Quality Commission (England), Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales and the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (Northern Ireland); and • Scrutiny typically refers to local authority scrutiny committees of nonexecutive councillors, the select committees in the UK Parliament and non-executive committees in the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and Northern Ireland Assembly. More generally non-executive members of boards of public bodies such as for schools, health trusts or housing associations, for example, would expect to undertake a scrutiny role, even if there is no separate committee for this purpose. Scrutiny, in this context tends to be an internal function. While these three functions are distinct, they have common features, similar processes, are underpinned by a common purpose and have some areas of overlap. They are not, however, seen to work together as well as they might and this has led to calls for more of a ‘systems approach’ (Crerar 2007). At the same time, various governments have sought to ‘rein in’ what they have seen as an unnecessarily high level of cost and bureaucracy associated with national audit and inspection regimes in particular (Levitt et al. 2010). Partly for these reasons, the landscape of audit, inspection and scrutiny, in the UK at least, is a changing one. Although not the focus here, it is worth also mentioning the Ombudsman as an additional element of professional accountability for the public sector. These independent offices, along with other bodies responsible for independent complaints handling, provide an important avenue for citizens to achieve accountability and redress (Brewer 2007). Finally, it is worth noting that the role of these functions is not always clear cut. First, while ‘ensuring things work as they should’ remains fundamental, the role of audit, inspection and scrutiny has developed over recent years also to help government ‘manage increasingly dispersed (and contracted out) forms of service provision’, guard against risk such as high-profile service failures and drive service improvement (Levitt et al. 2010, 3). Furthermore, as Boyne et al. (2002, 1199) suggest in respect of inspections, assessment ‘can have a symbolic importance, offering comfort or reassurance to a range of stakeholders’. Second, the role of audit, inspection and regulation can be open to

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interpretation. As Clarke (2008) argues, the roles of evaluative agencies such as these are subject to ‘contexts and complexity’ that mean that they will be seen as different things from different perspectives. Clarke uses dog metaphors to differentiate these different perspectives so that evaluative agencies might be seen as watch dogs (‘the impartial and independent purveyor of evidencebased judgements’), guide dogs (‘driven by the performance improvement agenda), mad dogs (‘savaging’ public bodies or at least evaluating in a way that is ‘expensive, burdensome, time consuming and intrusive’) or lap dogs (‘in collusion with either the government or service providers’). Care must be taken, therefore, not to assume that the understood roles of these functions are either shared or uncontested. Having set the scene by discussing audit, inspection and scrutiny in general terms, the next section will consider how co-assessment might enhance these functions.

The Benefits of Co-assessment Co-assessment is one of the four stages of co-production along with cocommissioning, co-design and co-delivery (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013). It ‘involves citizens working alongside professional staff and managers to help organisations better understand how they feel about services’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013, 11). In the context of audit, inspection and scrutiny, in coassessment the ‘professionals’ are the paid and elected assessors who work within these functions. While co-assessment can refer to the evaluation of the other three stages of co-production (Loeffler 2021), here the focus is on citizens and service users working alongside these paid and elected assessors to evaluate the delivery and performance of public services. It is possible, therefore for co-assessment to take place independently of co-design, co-commissioning and co-delivery. Co-assessment provides knowledge from citizens and services to which professionals would not otherwise have access through traditional service performance monitoring methods. It ‘offers the “insider view” that is often lacking in formal assessment’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013, 9). So, while statistics on show crime rates falling, citizens may nevertheless feel greater fear of crime (Bovaird and Loeffler 2013). Involving citizens in performance measurement ‘adds value to the process and better informs policy decisions’, so that ‘citizen participation into the formulation of socially relevant measures, data collection and presentation of results helps managers and elected officials design and measure services that matter to the community’ (Holzer and Kloby 2005, 523). Drawing on the co-production literature, there are three main types of benefits that might be expected from co-assessment: instrumental, democratising and relational (Woolum 2011). Each will be considered in turn. Instrumental benefits are those that help assessors to better achieve their aims (Woolum 2011). Specifically, co-assessment can help assessors overcome

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traditional problems associated with audit, inspection and scrutiny. Boyne et al. (2002), for example, in the context of the inspection process, identify five problems associated with these types of regulatory instrument: resistance by those being assessed; ritualistic compliance or tokenism, capture of the assessor by the assessed, leading to the loss of independent judgement, performance ambiguity (i.e. difficulties in defining performance or service standards) and lack of data. Co-assessment has the potential to mitigate against all of these problems. So, for example, adding citizens and service users into the assessment process should make it more difficult for those bodies that seek to resist assessment or take a tokenistic approach. Furthermore ‘involving users and taxpayers in defining inspection frameworks and judging performance… could reduce the risk of regulatory capture and the costs of inspection by encouraging a greater focus on service outcomes rather than managerial processes’ (Downe and Martin 2007, 229). Most significantly, perhaps, co-assessment helps to address performance ambiguity and lack of data. As Woolum notes, citizen involvement will ‘influence organizations to look beyond traditional managerial measures—input, output, efficiency—to consider measures that are more useful, meaningful and understandable to all managers and citizens’ (Woolum 2011, 83). At the same time, citizens and service users provide data to which professionals would not otherwise have access, as they ‘know things that many professionals do not know’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012, 1122). As well as improving effectiveness, co-assessment has the potential to make audit, inspection and scrutiny more democratic (Woolum 2011). This is a normative perspective that starts from the position that citizens are entitled to be involved in the assessment of public services. As Crerar argues, for example: ‘the public is the ultimate beneficiary of external scrutiny. As such, it is crucial that it is closely involved in both decisions about the use of scrutiny and any scrutiny activity’ (Crerar 2007, 3.20). For the Welsh Government (2012, 17), ‘engaging the public more deeply in scrutiny activity may be regarded as a hall-mark of healthy democracy’. Involving citizens in service assessment, then, leads to more responsive government and greater popular control, ‘giving citizens a say in determining what “good government” looks like” (Woolum 2011, 83). For Wallace (2006), involving consumers in services ensures openness, promotes the representation of the public interest, helps ensure that the voice of consumers is heard and helps citizens to understand better how government works. More generally, citizen participation fosters legitimacy and trust in government (Yetano et al. 2010; Holzer and Kloby 2005). In short, involving citizens in the assessment of public services not only makes those processes more responsive and representative but increases the democratic quality of government overall. In addition to instrumental and democratising benefits, co-assessment has the potential to provide relational benefits. As proponents of co-production more generally argue, when citizens and professional work together on coproductive relationships this encourages greater civic-mindedness and social capital in the citizenry while, at the same time, helping professionals to

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work more responsively, constructively and accountably (Needham 2008). Hence co-assessment has the potential to challenge assessors’ traditional notions of objectivity and independence, suggesting instead a more collaborative dynamic, whereby performance measurement, ‘rather than focussing on managerial accomplishments and managerial achievements, will address quality of life and community goals and aspirations’ (Callahan 2004, 41). Furthermore, these relationships and their focus on impact measures can ‘direct attention towards consumers, encourage long-term strategies and encourage innovation’ (Wallace 2006, 6). Hence co-assessment may provide professional and social benefits for assessors, citizens and service users way beyond the immediate assessment processes. However, ensuring that these benefits are realised may not be straightforward. Needham (2008) suggests that, given the definitional ‘elasticity’ of the term co-production, it is important to specify exactly which types of coproduction are likely to be the most effective. She argues that: ‘…the forms of co-production most likely to access its therapeutic and diagnostic benefits are those that are collective, dialogical, positive-sum and focused at the point of delivery, rather than individualised, zero-sum and abstracted from service experiences’ (Needham 2008, 225). Hence, when it comes to co-assessment in audit, inspection and scrutiny, the most effective activities are likely to be those that: • Involve groups rather than individuals; • ensure dialogue and deliberation between assessors and citizens rather than ‘top down’ consultation; • add something to the assessment process rather than simply replace something that assessors do; and • take place at the front line of the assessment process or of the service itself. Needham also cautions, however, that it may be difficult to meet all of these conditions at once and so they might best be considered as an ideal scenario. Nevertheless, they do provide a clear sense of what ‘good’ might look like for co-assessment in audit, inspection and scrutiny.

The Wheel of Co-assessment In the context of audit, scrutiny and inspection, assessment is a process that can be broken down into five elements: focussing, directing, detecting, judging and effecting. These commonalities in the assessment process build from the three core elements of regulation highlighted by Hood et al. (2000) namely directing, detecting and effecting.

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The wheel of co-assessment in Fig. 23.1 takes each of these traditional elements and replaces them with the co-productive alternative placing them as sequential stages in the assessment process. Implicit in the wheel is the idea that the co-assessment process is a cycle; once the each of the five elements have been completed, the process starts again but now, of course, the coassessors have extra knowledge and expertise gained from previous cycles. At the heart of the wheel are Needham’s four characteristics of effective practice, namely that activities are collective, deliberative, additive and frontline. Each element of the wheel is discussed below along with empirical examples. Co-focussing refers to the identification of what service, or aspect of service, is to be assessed. Traditionally in local government scrutiny, for example, focussing entails a work planning exercise, drawing on a range of inputs, that determines the services most worthy of assessment according to levels of concern and importance. While auditors and inspectors may wish to assess each of the services or organisations that they are responsible for, it may nevertheless be seen as necessary to focus on the most concerning cases first. A co-productive approach, however, gives citizens or service users a decisive say in what is to be assessed. The Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee of the Welsh Assembly, for example, gave the public the option to

Co-effecting

Co-judging

Co-focussing

Collective Deliberative Additive Frontline

Co-detecting

Fig. 23.1

The wheel of co-assessment

Co-directing

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vote, via an online survey, on a shortlist of topics and then undertook scrutiny of the topic that was chosen (BBC 2016). The second element is co-directing . This refers to the setting of criteria that determine whether a service is good or not. Traditionally this might refer to nationally or locally determined service standards. These standards can be problematic, however, if either rigidly or inconsistently applied (Boyne et al. 2002). A co-productive approach, on the other hand, implies that citizens contribute, either in whole or in part, to the determination of what good looks like, thus creating an entirely contextual standard, free of the problems associated with more traditional ‘top-down’ approaches. In Scotland, for example, consumers were involved in setting the National Care Standards (Wallace 2006). Co-detecting is the third element of co-assessment. Assessment requires data to inform judgements and detecting refers to the collection of that data. Traditionally data gathering centres on the performance and financial data collected by service providers that may be supplemented with evidence from citizens or service users through feedback forms or surveys. A co-productive approach to detecting, however, suggests that citizens and service users will not simply be sources of data, but actively involved in the collection of data. Loeffler (2021), for example, highlights the examples of peer reviews of commissioned adult care services in an English local authority and citizen inspectors of different services of a Scottish local authority. In the housing context, social housing tenants have worked with the Audit Commission in England as ‘tenant inspection advisors’ and the Scottish Housing Regulator to co-collect service data and this latter experience ‘was seen as positive by the inspection teams, staff of inspected organisations and tenant assessors themselves’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012, 1136). Co-judging is the process of jointly deciding, given the data collected, at what level the service in question can be said to be performing or, in the case of audit, whether the service is functioning in a safe and effective manner and providing value for money. Traditionally, while auditors, inspectors and scrutineers seek to be objective, in practice there will be a degree of intuition supported by discussion and moderation (Nutley et al. 2012). A co-productive approach, on the other hand, brings in the opinions of citizens and service users into the formation of decisions either through negotiation or deliberation with professionals or even as the final arbiters. As consensus appears to be important for assessors (Nutley et al. 2012), this suggests that, once brought into the process, citizens and service users will be in a position to influence. While examples of co-judging appear rare, nevertheless there are examples of bringing citizens and service users into scrutiny arrangements to good effect as co-opted members of committees (Centre for Public Scrutiny 2018). The fifth element is co-effecting . Ultimately, the purpose of the assessment process is to make some kind of a difference—so, for example, ‘a successful inspection system requires a way of changing the behaviour of service providers and securing improvements in performance’ (Boyne et al.

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2002, 1203). Traditionally change may be influenced via informal advice, formal reports, sanctions or rewards (Boyne et al. 2002). A co-productive approach adds a new dimension, as service users and citizens are involved both in the assessment and the delivery of services. Publishing reports also helps to empower consumers of services in their dealings with professionals and promotes accountability (Wallace 2006). The UK wide Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership, for example, involves patient representatives in the planning and delivery of the National Diabetes Audit. One aspect of this is their involvement in communicating and campaigning to promote the audit outcomes for example around foot care reform. As a result ‘the patient representatives feel that their role has been crucial to ensuring the results from the audits are used to shape treatment paradigms and assist patients with diabetes to live longer and fuller lives’ (Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership 2018, 3). The wheel of co-assessment should be useful for researchers and practitioners. For researchers it provides a framework of analysis that can be used for determining the extent and likely effectiveness of co-assessment in any audit, inspection or scrutiny process. In particular it provides a distinction between processes that are fully co-productive, i.e. all of the elements are co-productive, and those that are partially so. It is worth noting, perhaps, that while each element is important, co-judging might be considered the pivotal element of co-assessment and therefore ‘first amongst equals’. In practice, assessment processes are likely to combine a mix of traditional and co-productive elements. Given the rarity of fully co-productive assessment processes, it may be helpful for bodies looking to experiment, to start with one or two elements and use these as stepping stones to a more comprehensive approach in future. Co-assessment is necessarily a complex endeavour, so assessors should also follow the good practice advice for public participation processes more generally: be clear about purpose, work to a specific context and undertake an experimental design approach (Bryson et al. 2013).

Barriers to Co-assessment Despite the potential benefits and the examples listed above, co-assessment in audit, inspection and scrutiny is nevertheless rare in practice. In the UK, for example, there was ‘little evidence of meaningful public engagement’ in the substantial programme of Best Value inspections of local authorities that took place in England throughout the 2000s (Downe and Martin 2007, 229). Generally, in inspections public involvement is rare and ‘there is a long way to go before public priorities and perspectives are fully recognised in inspection methodologies’ (Martin 2010, 28). More recently Wales Audit Office has identified the lack of public involvement as a shortcoming of Welsh Council scrutiny functions (Auditor General for Wales 2019). Why might this be the case? While research in this area is thin, it is possible to speculate about three types of barriers: technical, socio-cultural and institutional.

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From a technical perspective a number of factors mitigate against the development of co-assessment in audit, inspection and scrutiny. Loeffler (2021) highlights the challenges for assessors, both in terms of finding the most appropriate citizens and service users to participate, and in terms of the costs of setting up and supporting co-assessment processes. This support also needs to be pitched carefully. Assessors must find the right level of support through training, management and processes that ensure that the input of citizens is of sufficient technical quality while, at the same time, not overburdening citizens and citizen organisations and thereby losing the ‘voluntary and spontaneous’ aspects of citizen participation (Tanese and Terzi 2012). Finally, co-assessment requires a different set of skills that auditors, inspectors and scrutineers do not traditionally have and managers supporting public participation in service performance evaluation for the first time will need potentially costly training (Holzer and Kloby 2005). Even if technical barriers can be overcome, co-assessment takes place against a backdrop of apathy on the part of the majority of citizens and service users. Finding citizens and service users who are willing to participate is a challenge when citizens ‘are often cynical, distrustful and primarily comfortable participating with government from a distance’ (Holzer and Kloby 2005, 523). As Martin (2010) notes in the context of inspections, there is scant evidence that the public are interested in these types of activity. Furthermore, even those citizens who do participate may feel discouraged when the impact they were hoping to have has not been realised (Tanese and Terzi 2012). As well as the practical and socio-cultural barriers, there are possible institutional reasons as to why co-assessment is yet to take hold in audit, inspection and scrutiny. Here path dependency might be a factor, whereby familiar and traditional ways of doing things continue because this is the path of least resistance. In general terms, supporting citizen engagement does not necessarily fit well within a traditional bureaucracy (Holzer and Kloby 2005). Institutional resistance might be heightened in this context because assessors are by nature a conservative profession—indeed, conservativism is a studied characteristic of the auditing business. Beyond a conservative outlook, however, there are aspects of traditional practice that co-assessment might threaten to disrupt and which therefore act as institutional barriers. Three aspects in particular can be highlighted. First, while assessment of this type is nominally done in the public interest, in practice the primary line of accountability is to central government for external assessment and to political and organisational leaders in the case of internal assessment. Citizens and service users entering the assessment process, on the other hand, have different lines of accountability: to their community organisations, their fellow citizens or themselves, for example. Second, the relationship between the assessor and the body being assessed can also be, to a certain degree, co-dependent. In some cases, the assessor can even be captured by the assessed but, even where this is not the case, common values, norms and professional understanding work to ensure a way of doing things to which

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citizens and service users would be disruptive. Finally, the way that assessors constitute ‘the public’ can make it difficult for assessors to bring them into the process. Traditional models of assessment rest on notions of the public as taxpayers or consumers (Clarke et al. 2000) and these ideas do not sit easily with bringing the public in as co-producers. While the low levels of co-assessment in audit, inspection and scrutiny suggest that the barriers are significant and will continue to disrupt efforts to introduce co-assessment, these barriers may themselves be disrupted. The source of this disruption is the subject of the next section.

Digital Era Opportunities While progress towards greater co-assessment in audit, inspection and scrutiny might seem slow, the advent of digital and social technologies might provide, not only a boost to traditional elements, but also a way to overcome existing barriers and transform the fundamentals of the assessment process. Here, the work of Linders (2012) provides a useful framework for discussion. Linders starts by highlighting the close relationship between the increasing interest in co-production and the rise of ‘social media, ubiquitous mobile connectivity, and web 2.0 interactivity’ (Linders 2012, 446). He then provides a typology of ‘social media age’ co-production initiatives within which he identifies three types of monitoring initiatives, namely citizen reporting, open book government and self-monitoring. While Linders’ discussion does not refer specifically to audit, inspection and scrutiny, and focusses instead on government in general, these three types provide a useful framework for looking at the potential future of co-assessment and the foundation for three digital era scenarios. The first scenario is citizen reporting . This refers to the digital and social tools that citizens and service users can use to quickly and easily provide feedback to government. It is a form of citizen sourcing that can help assessors to be more responsive to the public. As Linders suggests: ‘such systems can facilitate deep collaboration between citizens and government—even anonymously, to promote participation from those who would fear retribution’ (Linders 2012, 448). One prominent example is the California Report Card (Nelimarkka et al. 2014). This is a mobile app and website that allows the public to assign grades to aspects of state policy as well as highlighting concerns (CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative 2019). Since February 2014 over 13,000 people from all 58 counties have assigned over 50,000 grades to policies of the State of California and suggested issues for the next report card. Complaints are also a potentially significant aspect of citizen reporting with apps such as ‘FixMyStreet’ one of many innovative ways that public services can use to elicit complaints and reporting. Complaints are also potentially a gateway for citizens into working collaboratively to solve problems (Simmons and Brennan 2013). For this reason alone, engaging with

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complaints should be of interest to assessors, particularly given the challenges in getting citizens involved in co-assessment. While it might seem that such tools should be able to enhance the work of audit, inspection of scrutiny without disrupting the underlying patterns of work, they nevertheless suggest radically new techniques that assessors will need to use. The role of assessors, therefore, needs to incorporate new media and facilitation skills if they are to effectively collaborate with citizens and not simply delegate these responsibilities to others. The challenge, however, is to ensure that these new mechanisms are both collective and deliberative in their operation, in line with Needham’s characteristics of effective co-production, rather than consultative. The second scenario, drawn from Linders’ second type of monitoring initiative, is open book government . As he suggests: ‘Advancements in data management, dissemination, and analysis have equipped individual citizens and civil society organizations with the capability to sift through vast amounts of government data’ (Linders 2012, 449). Hence government provides a platform for citizens and non-government organisations who wish to evaluate government activity, although government itself is not responsible for this activity. This approach has been trialled by national government in England who, alongside abolishing the national Audit Commission, required local government to publish all expenditure above £500 with the intention of empowering an army of ‘armchair auditors’ (Ferry and Eckersley 2015b). There are, however, doubts about the willingness of citizens to fulfil this type of role. As Clarke (2008, 136) argues: ‘Although scrutiny agencies publish their reports, commentaries and evaluations, these seem not to have reached the “general reader”. There remains a gap between the imagined ‘active citizen-consumer’ scrutinising performance evaluations and making rational/responsible choices, and the everyday practices of members of the public’. Open book government nevertheless implies a very different role for assessors. First, as cheerleaders for data transparency, they might follow the lead of the Local Government Association (2019) who urge local authorities to encourage feedback, publish data by default, not just the minimum required and publish information about the data and how people can get involved. Second, assessors might go further and use formal powers to require open book government as a core element of their mission—as Etzioni (2014) argues, transparency in itself is not enough to ensure government auditing by citizens; it requires regulation. Furthermore, ‘transparency can lead to increased accountability if it takes account of context, is adaptive to ongoing changes, and ensures that citizens can access and understand the relevant data’ (Ferry and Eckersley 2015a, 11). Assessors, therefore, might take on the mantle of regulators in this regard. Finally, audit, inspection and scrutiny might become not just advocates for, and regulators of, openness and responsiveness in government, but might themselves provide the platform for active

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citizens and armchair auditors by publishing and curating data in an accessible way. The third digital era scenario for assessors is self -monitoring . As Linders argues: Data analysis and mobile connectivity equip citizens with the means to provide feedback on the quality of services offered by a particular office or official in real time. Emerging ‘crowdsourced’ evaluation systems already inform citizens’ private decisions on a daily basis, whether it is selecting a good restaurant from Yelp.com, reading the most popular news article on Reddit.com, or avoiding a poorly rated book on Amazon.com. (Linders 2012, 450)

Hence the citizen-to-citizen evaluation platforms are already a familiar and ubiquitous aspect of daily life for citizens. Consumer goods, restaurants, hotels and trades people are just some of the products and services subject to extensive evaluation by such platforms. Citizens can decide what to focus on, determine their own interpretation of standards through star ratings (no objective standards are provided), provide data as they wish to, and form their own judgements. They can also decide whether and how to act in response to the information they receive from other citizens. Businesses also have no choice but to engage with such platforms—restaurants and hotels, for example, often respond to comments on the TripAdvisor platform and encourage customers to provide positive reviews. While far from widespread, a number of initiatives suggest that such platforms may also be emergent in the realm of public services. One such platform is Care Opinion (formally ‘Patient Opinion’) that was formed in 2005 and provides a platform for anyone receiving health and care services to share feedback online. Posted stories are automatically forwarded to service providers as well as regulators and watchdogs via email. Around three quarters of stories are responded to by responsible staff and, as reported by the Chief Executive of Care Opinion, the result is ‘thousands of small, practical improvements to care settings, policies and practices’ (Munro 2017, 722). Other benefits have also been observed such as improvements in staff confidence and team morale; greater trust between staff and service users; and team cultures that focus more on feedback and improvement. Of particular interest is the quality of the stories being posted. While some may have expected negativity and complaints to dominate, the opposite appears to be the case. Again, from the Chief Executive: The stories that people share on Care Opinion are incredibly diverse, from short, direct statements of fact to heartfelt, moving accounts of breath-taking intimacy. People write about their experiences of miscarriage, cancer, self-harm or fractured limbs sometimes in anger, but often with humour, delight or amazement. They write about the staff who cared for them, those who gave them hope to carry on, or who, with a careless word, diminished them. Most often though, people write to say thank you. (Munro 2017, 722)

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Other examples from the world of health include the ‘Rate My GP’ app that draws on the TripAdvisor rating system and the Good Care Guide that helps people to find and rate local childcare and elderly care services (Simmons and Brennan 2013). In this self-monitoring scenario, the role of assessors is to step back and provide the space, resources and support needed by citizens to undertake their own assessment. The assessors’ role, in this context, is to provide advocacy and legitimacy and, for platforms developed independently, to offer support as partners. While consumer platforms such as TripAdvisor are provided commercially alternative models will need to be developed for public service self-monitoring platforms. There are some precedents, however. Cittadinanzattiva in Italy (Tanese and Terzi 2012), for example, is a movement that has been active since 1978 and promotes independent and autonomous evaluation of public services by groups of citizens, sometimes in partnership with public bodies and sometimes in conflict. Where citizen-led platforms do not exist, it may be appropriate for assessors to provide them, albeit in partnership with citizens and community groups. These three scenarios then, provide a framework for thinking about how co-assessment might develop in the context of digital and social technologies. There is no reason why these approaches should not be complementary, indeed, the ‘Rate My GP’ app provides citizen-to citizen assessment but uses ‘open book’ government data to support its functions. Each scenario, however, suggests a different role for assessors and each scenario also suggests a different type of collaboration between assessors and citizens. So, while citizen reporting might be considered an enhancement of the familiar assessment process, as typified by the wheel of co-assessment, open book government and self-reporting both suggest a different type of relationship, where professional and elected assessors provide the context for DIY assessment by citizens and service users. While it might be argued that this moves beyond co-assessment and into community self-organising, at a strategic level co-production is still taking place.

Conclusion Ultimately the prospects for co-assessment in audit, inspection and scrutiny are difficult to determine and may rest on whether a pessimistic or an optimistic view is chosen. Pessimists will point to the dearth of practical examples of co-assessment in this context and the relatively low levels of interest in coassessment in general. Optimists, on the other hand, will look at the increasing interest in co-production across public services and the intriguing potential of digital era technology and wonder if radical change is on its way. Only time will tell who is right.

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Ferry, L., & Eckersley, P. (2015b). Budgeting and Governing for Deficit Reduction in the UK Public Sector: Act Three ‘Accountability and Audit Arrangements’. Public Money & Management, 35(3), 203–210. Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership. (2018). ‘HQIP Case Study: PPI in National Clinical Audit—Submission to the Richard Driscoll Memorial Award 2018’. Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership. Holzer, M., & Kloby, K. (2005). Public Performance Measurement: An Assessment of the State-of-the-Art and Models for Citizen Participation. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 54(7), 517–532. Hood, C., James, O., & Scott, C. (2000). Regulation of Government: Has It Increased, Is It Increasing, Should It Be Diminished? Public Administration, 78(2), 283–304. Levitt, R., Martin, S., Nutley, S., & Solesbury, W. (2010). Evidence for Accountability: Using Evidence in the Audit, Inspection and Scrutiny of UK Government. London: Nuffield Foundation. Linders, D. (2012). From E-government to We-government: Defining a Typology for Citizen Coproduction in the Age of Social Media. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 446–454. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2012.06.003. Local Government Association. (2019). ‘New Conversations 2.0: LGA Guide to Engagement’. Local Government Association. Loeffler, E. (2021). Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, S. (2010). Knowledge from Inspection: External Oversight and Information to Improve Performance. In K. Walshe, G. Harvey, & P. Jas (Eds.), Connecting Knowledge and Performance in Public Services: From Knowing to Doing (pp. 16–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munro, J. (2017). Online Opinion Changing Care. British Journal of Nursing, 26(13), 722. Needham, C. (2008). Realising the Potential of Co-Production: Negotiating Improvements in Public Services. Social Policy and Society, 7(2), 221–231. Nelimarkka, M., Nonnecke, B., Krishnan, S., Aitamurto, T., Catterson, D., Crittenden, C., et al. (2014). ‘Comparing Three Online Civic Engagement Platforms Using the “Spectrum of Public Participation” Framework’. In Proceedings of the Oxford Internet, Policy, and Politics Conference (IPP), pp. 25–26. Nutley, S., Levitt, R., Solesbury, W., & Martin, S. (2012). Scrutinizing Performance: How Assessors Reach Judgements About Public Services. Public Administration, 90(4), 869–885. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2011.02022.x. Simmons, R., & Brennan, C. (2013). ‘Grumbles, Gripes and Grievances: The Role of Complaints in Transforming Public Services’. Nesta. Tanese, A., & Terzi, A. (2012). Civic Evaluation as a Tool for Analyzing and Achieving Quality of Life Under the Citizen’s Point of View. In Quality of Life in Italy (pp. 179–197). Dordrecht: Springer. Wallace, J. (2006). ‘Scrutiny and the Consumer’. Scottish Consumer Council. Welsh Government. (2012). ‘Statutory Guidance from the Local Government Measure 2011’. Welsh Government. Woolum, J. (2011). Citizen Involvement in Performance Measurement and Reporting. Public Performance & Management Review, 35(1), 79–102. https:// doi.org/10.2753/pmr1530-9576350104.

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PART VIII

Implementing and Scaling Co-production in Public Service Organisations and Systems

CHAPTER 24

Relational Leadership: An Analytical Lens for the Exploration of Co-production Hans Schlappa, Yassaman Imani, and Tatsuya Nishino

Introduction In this chapter we argue that asking ‘who is in the lead’ generates an important analytical perspective for the exploration of co-production processes which are characterised by complex, multilayered relationships between organisations, professionals and citizens. Ospina and Foldy (2016, 2) argue that ‘shifts from pyramids to webs and from production to co-production change the nature of public leadership’. Yet public leadership research has been slow to respond as it largely remains grounded in hierarchical and heroic leadership perspectives, which cast leaders as powerful individuals able to control and direct others, despite the extensive discourse on these collaborative forms of public governance, networks and systems (Denhardt and Denhardt 2015; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011; Osborne 2010b). This ‘leader-centred’ approach offers an ‘incomplete picture’ of the realities of collaborative service provision (Ospina and Foldy 2016, 2–3). Hence more theoretical and empirical studies are required to develop a leadership concept that encompasses ‘processes, context, and complexity and to consider actors beyond formal leaders, arenas beyond the bureaucracy, and levels of analysis such as the interorganizational and systems of networks’ (Ospina 2017, 2). In other words, leadership is H. Schlappa (B) · Y. Imani Hertfordshire Business School, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. Nishino Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan

© The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_24

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increasingly recognised as a social, collective and relational phenomenon where no individual or a group is in full control. The co-production literature suggests that both professionals and citizens need to share control over the co-production process to achieve their goals but does not offer conceptual tools that would guide research and practice. One of the key questions for co-production research, and the one that we take up in this chapter, is which collective model of leadership would be suitable for co-production research that is concerned with interrelated and emergent processes for achieving common goals? The relational leadership perspective promises important insights into how leadership between professionals and citizens is enacted in contemporary public service systems. From this perspective, ‘leadership is collective work and can be identified when members of a group find a path forward, commit to it, and adapt to changing circumstances’ (Ospina and Foldy 2016, 4). This conceptualisation seems pertinent for public service contexts that are characterised by complex and reciprocal relationships between managers, professionals and service users. Furthermore, focusing on the relational dimension of leading public services asks us to explore the tensions that arise between professionals and citizens, with the aim of looking for how these can be used to inform the service co-production process. This chapter is organised as follows. First, we offer an overview of limitations of the mainstream public leadership perspectives. This is followed by a brief review of relational leadership theory, from which we develop an analytical perspective that focuses on context, motivations and power. These dimensions are then applied to different levels and different stages of coproduction using a case study to illustrate the main points of our argument. We then construct a framework which shows that context, motivations and power are valuable analytical dimensions for the exploration of the levels and stages of co-production. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications for co-production research and practice.

Limitations of Mainstream Perspectives on Leading Public Services Reviews of the mainstream literature show that leader-centred, transaction and transformational perspectives on leadership still feature in public administration research (Van Wart 2003, 2013; Vogel and Masal 2015). The transactional perspective on leading gained popularity with the advent of the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm that promoted the principal–agent relationships and economic rationality which favoured leadership models that focused on achieving efficiency, effectiveness and economy. This emphasis on performance management cultivates dyadic relationships between leaders and followers where reward is contingent on the efforts made to achieve defined

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goals (Bass 1990; Moynihan and Thomas 2013). NPM-inspired leadership concepts gave preference to leadership styles that promised the achievement of pre-defined outputs at the expense of recognising and addressing challenges that are ‘wicked’, i.e. requiring the sharing and meshing of knowledge between people and across institutional boundaries (Clark 2014). Such a perspective on leading seems to have limited application to coproduction for two main reasons. First, current methods of integrating service delivery across professional disciplines and organisations through networks and alliances require a leadership that shares vertical and horizontal accountability. Second, the notion of citizens as passive users of services has been discredited in critiques of the underlying logics of NPM, where the complexities of human abilities, needs and motivations were assumed to be subordinated to management principles rooted in the logics of linear and mechanistic processes (Osborne 2010a). A recent systematic review of the public leadership literature suggests that an instrumental-rational approach to leading supports this argument and shows that such a perspective belies the ‘active role’ citizens play in public service design and delivery (Vogel and Masal 2015). Edwards and Turnbull (2013) contrast the transactional leader as someone working within a given culture to achieve pre-determined goals, with the transformational leader who changes culture and sets new directions. Transformational leadership theory emphasises the ability of leaders to set out a vision that inspires followers to produce mission-related results even in heavily constrained situations. It is the dominant perspective in public leadership discourse (Ospina 2017), mainly due to its promise to bring about innovative and performance enhancing change (Andrews and Boyne 2010). At its core, transformational leadership is concerned with organisational change and networks of leadership relations which cross organisational and professional boundaries (Currie and Lockett 2007). While there is a focus on relationships and interactions, the emphasis still remains on the authority of the leader and his/her ability to engage and influence followers. Thus it is assumed that transformational leaders, by appealing to the collective values of followers, impact the organisational culture, employee motivation, performance and reform (Bellé 2014). One of the limitations of this school of leadership research is that the agency of the leader, his/her competencies and skills, tend to be overemphasised while the context in which leadership is enacted receives limited attention (Fitzgerald et al. 2012; Vogel and Masal 2015). Strongly institutionalised public service settings with high levels of professionalisation have been found to constrain severely the capacity of leaders to lead (Teelken et al. 2012). Ferlie (2012) argues that complex organisational and sectoral contexts require a negotiated, team-based approach to leading that can engage the often conflicting motivations, values and practices of multi-professionalised service provision settings: ‘This form of leadership is mixed, messy and at times mundane…’ (ibid., 250).

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We cannot do justice to the diverse discourse on public leadership here (for reviews see Ospina 2017; Van Wart 2003, 2013) but these dominant perspectives tend to be rooted in the notion that leaders are the source of leadership and perform their roles within organisations in pursuit of goals that are predefined in political and managerial arenas. Service co-production, however, is not primarily concerned with the management of organisations, it is about the collaborations between professional and citizen co-producers. They take place within, as well as outside, organisational boundaries and occur at different levels and different stages of the process (Nabatchi et al. 2017; Bovaird and Loeffler 2012). This means that goals can only be partially pre-determined and that their achievement requires joint deliberation and co-ordinated action between professionals and citizens. These new realities highlight the limited value of the leader-centric perspectives in explaining how leading happens in contemporary public services.

Distributed Leadership Theory Distributed leadership theory reflects the emphasis co-production theory attributes to collaboration and offers a perspective on leading that supports the exploration of collaboration between professionals and citizens. Theory of distributed leadership perceives leading as an activity which is inherently dispersed within teams and organisations (Gronn 2002). In a co-production relationship, professionals do not, and perhaps should not, aim to assume a privileged position in relation to citizens, casting them into the role of followers of an appointed, or self-appointed, leader with power. Leading coproduction is therefore a shared responsibility, asking professionals and citizens to combine their skills, resources and authority to accomplish a particular task. Bolden et al. (2008, 11) define distributed leadership as: ‘…a less formalized model of leadership where leadership responsibility is dissociated from the organizational hierarchy. It is proposed that individuals at all levels in the organization and in all roles can exert leadership influence over their colleagues and thus influence the overall direction of the organization’. Within a variety of terms used to describe this phenomenon, shared and distributed leadership are the most common (for a review see Bolden 2011). Despite the different assumptions about how leading is shared or distributed, both terms build on the notion that leadership is an emergent property of interacting individuals and that expertise is found among all the actors involved who are enabled to contribute to the process without being controlled by a few individuals in privileged positions (Bennett et al. 2003). Conceptualising leadership of the co-production process therefore requires attention to sensemaking, persuasion and negotiation between professionals and citizen co-producers. The literature points to different mechanisms through which leadership functions might be shared. For example MacBeath et al. (2004) show that distributed leadership

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can be characterised as involving delegation and negotiation between actors in ways that lead to incremental and opportunistic adoption of leadership roles according to the skills and knowledge of those involved. Spillane (2006) points to differences in distribution of leadership functions, such as collaborative distribution, where individuals work together in time and place to execute leadership routines, and collective distribution where actors operate interdependently to fulfil leadership functions, or co-ordinated distribution where individuals’ work is guided by superior authority to ensure sequential completion of leadership routines. Studies on leadership of schools, for example, show that leadership functions are exercised not only by senior managers at the apex of the organisation, but extend to everyone who takes the initiative, influences other people and is involved in shaping the direction of a process (Woods 2015, 2016), thus offering all three variations of distributed leadership offered by Spillane. In this perspective ‘context and the practice of leadership make up and change one another’ (Ospina 2017, 280). While distributed leadership theory resonates with the nature of service co-production, its conceptual frame requires an extension because distributed leadership theory is premised on the principle that leading is shared among professional staff working for an organisation—the notion that citizens are among those who enact leadership on process and outcomes of collaborative actions is not acknowledged in the distributed leadership literature. We propose to address this gap by using an extended relational leadership perspective as an analytical lens for the exploration of leading in co-production.

Relational Leadership in Co-production: Three Analytical Dimensions A narrow focus on institutions, and by extension the professional values and regulatory powers they are governed by, underplays the importance of citizens in the co-production of services. One of the key distinctive features of the co-production concept is an explicit emphasis on collaboration between professionals and citizens. Thus, explorations of co-production processes require a focus on relational dynamics to explain what actually takes place when professionals and citizens come together to co-produce a service. The relational leadership perspective (Hosking et al. 2012; Ospina et al. 2012) adopts a social constructionist position and regards realities as ‘multiple, local-historical constructions’ (Van Der Haar and Hosking 2004, 1020). Analysis informed by this strand of relational leadership perspective combines a focus on interactions, in which relational realties are co-constructed, with a critical approach towards conceptualising power as emerging in contested, perpetual relational processes (Hosking 2007). ‘Power’ is considered to be both relational and paradoxical, in that it is both enabling and constraining at the same time (Hosking 2007; Van Der Haar and Hosking 2004). This

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means power shifting to an individual enables her/him to influence, or make, decisions but at the same time that power is constrained by other individuals’ power, resources, knowledge and expertise and many other factors. A relational leadership perspective encourages us to conceive the coproduction process as inherently negotiated, emergent and reliant on a range of actors who may have both common and contrasting motivations, and are able to exercise power, which in turn is moderated by the context in which these relations occur. Conceiving co-production in such a way supports Bovaird’s (2007) argument that compares co-production processes to a complex adaptive system (Stacey 1996) in which professionals, users, communities and politicians create multipurpose, multilevel and multiagency relationships through which the service process is negotiated from planning to delivery and evaluation. In adopting relational leadership, we assume that coproduction is not characterised by ‘equal and reciprocalrelationships’ between professionals and citizens, thus departing from the new economics foundation definition of co-production (Stephens et al. 2008), neither it is primarily about professionals instructing, controlling and directing citizens. Instead, leading co-production is perceived as a process between professionals and citizens which is shaped by the context in which it occurs, the motivations they bring to the collaboration, and the power relations between the co-producers. These dimensions are interlinked but for analytical purposes we separately define them below. Context: Lightly Structured Understanding leadership as a relational process recognises that the process of leading cannot be separated from its context (Dachler and Hosking 1995). In other words, leadership is both shaped by, and shapes, the structures in which it is enacted. Conceptualising leadership in this way allows for a better understanding of what might make an effective context in which coproduction can take place. This context would vary depending on whether the service is core or complementary (Brandsen and Honingh 2015), whether it is produced at a collective, group or individual level (Nabatchi et al. 2017; Brudney and England 1983) and the extent to which citizens are involved in service commissioning, design, delivery and evaluation (Bovaird and Loeffler 2016). The concept of light structuring (Hosking et al. 2012) allows us to draw some inferences in regard to key characteristics of a context that would support service co-production. Hosking highlights the need for a minimal structure, so that participants are enabled to have open discussions that lead to learning and action. How much structure is ‘enough’ would depend on factors such as legal and regulatory requirements, professional codes of conduct, resources and accountabilities—to name but a few such contextual factors. However, such light structures could potentially create their own problems too. For example, when urgent decisions are required, light structures may

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lead to excessive discussions that prolong reaching consensus. Co-producers might also agree that hierarchy would be essential to facilitate co-production, for example in penal or emergency services (Tuurnas et al. 2016; Alford 2014). In some emergency situations or when serious crimes have been detected coproducers could even regard co-production as inappropriate. Nevertheless, we argue that those leading the process should aim to minimise the contextual influences which constrain discussions and actions between co-producers. The constraints imposed by governments and public agencies can be extensive, but professionals have some discretion over how to mitigate against institutional contexts that have been found to dominate the co-production process (Steen and Van Eijk 2015; Van Eijk and Steen 2014b; Tortzen 2015) and they exercise some control over such constraints with the aim of creating a ‘light structure’. However, the task of creating a light structure context for co-production is not solely the task of paid professionals. Citizens also shape the context in which services are co-created, which might include the conception, design, delivery as well as the evaluation of co-produced services (Bovaird and Loeffler 2016; Loeffler et al. 2012). Motivations: Expect and Accept Differences The complex range of motivations which citizens and officials bring to the co-production relationship are open to influence and change according to the context and purpose of co-production (Fledderus et al. 2014; Fledderus and Honingh 2016; Van Eijk and Steen 2014a, 2016). Exploring the motivations of co-producers could include their interpretation of the social symbols referred to above, as well as the experiences, knowledge and expertise that they bring to the co-production process. This involves an examination of the potential tensions arising from negotiating a shared vision about a projected future, namely agreeing on ‘what would work and how to achieve it’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2007). This also includes finding out about each other’s interests, perspectives and limitations, something Cunliffe and Eriksen have described as ‘finding out who you are and who we are’ (2011, 1427). The values professionals and citizens bring to co-production are important to such explorations, not only because values underpin motivations, but also because values arise through the co-production interactions and their impact is contingent on the context in which these interactions happen (Joas 2000; Stacey 2007). A relational leadership perspective focuses on value sets, agendas and experiences that influence the co-producers and it challenges assumptions about the interests of professionals being dominant. Creating an open dialogue between co-producers about the content or purpose of their interactions means to expect and accept differences. Hence, surfacing motivations is likely to expose tensions about what each party expects from the co-production and would form an important element of an analysis about how co-producers negotiate and agree what would work and how

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to achieve it. Co-production research therefore needs to take a critical stance towards assumptions that the desire and the ability to determine processes and outcomes reside within independent individuals. Power: Negotiated, Dynamic, Emergent The exploration of relational dynamics in co-production needs to be sensitive to how actions and behaviours of assumed powerful professionals correspond to actions and behaviours of citizen co-producers. Power is an inseparable and paradoxical aspect of human relations, in that it both enables and constrains individuals as they try to meet their own demands and expectations, and the demands and expectations of others, which could be different (Elias 1991). Therefore, power is relational and emerges in contested perpetual processes by interdependent agents—hence they both enable and constrain each other, depending on the expectations and actions of others and their own (Stacey 2007; Van Der Haar and Hosking 2004). This means when power shifts to an individual, it enables her/him to influence or make decisions, but at the same time that power is constrained by other individuals’ power, resources, knowledge and expertise. Power differentials can also result in ‘inclusions’ and ‘exclusions’, as over time, actors tend to form some degree of cohesion and develop a collective identity (Elias 1991). Thus, the more powerful actors can affect others’ decision-making and actions in their circle (Stacey 2007). Complementary perspectives on power such as top-down, individual and cooperative power (Woods and Woods 2013) offer rich insight for the analysis of interactions between professional and citizen co-producers. Understanding that power is not static but negotiated between people who collaborate to achieve shared objectives is integral to the analysis of how coproduction is being led. Although citizen co-producers are often portrayed as being ‘un-empowered’ (Steen and Van Eijk 2015; Van Eijk and Steen 2014b), we argue that power shifts between professional and citizen co-producers according to their expertise, knowledge, resources, position as well as the levels and stages of co-production. The relational leadership perspective allows us to explore issues concerned with power dynamics at individual, group, and collective co-production processes. This shifts assumptions of relationships between co-producers from one where the professional ‘is in the lead’ to one where leadership and associated expressions of power are negotiated, dynamic and emergent.

Relational Leadership at Different Levels of Co-production Nabatchi et al. (2017) develop a typology of co-production in which the question of ‘who is involved’ helps distinguish between three different levels of co-production. At individual level, professionals and citizens work together directly to generate services or benefits for the citizen in most cases but can

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also create benefits for third parties. At group level, professionals work with a group of citizens to create services or outcomes that benefit them directly or are of benefit to the wider community. At the collective level, professionals work with segments of the population to produce benefits for specific groups or the whole community. To illustrate how a relational leadership perspective supports a rigorous analysis of co-production processes we apply our three analytical dimensions to the case of Altena (Schlappa 2016, 2017).

Co-production in Altena Altena’s history as a mining and manufacturing town on the edge of the Ruhrgebiet in Germany stretches back over several centuries. The town’s prosperity began to deteriorate in the 1970s and by 2012 the number of jobs had declined by almost 50% while the population shrank by 43% to 17,300 inhabitants. The ongoing loss of economically active residents resulted in a high proportion of older people in the population as well as rapidly falling property values, reduced municipal revenues, and deteriorating services and physical infrastructures. Due to a high financial deficit, Altena was put into ‘special measures’ in 2002 when its budget became subject to governmental control. A study funded by a charitable foundation created an opportunity to explore how Altena might address its challenges. Over a period of two years, researchers facilitated collaboration between municipal staff, politicians and citizens, creating a future-oriented strategic framework called ‘Altena 2015’ which in 2007 became the basis for all municipal decision-making. This framework consisted of 10 strategic priorities and 317 actions addressing a wide range of problems, from reducing housing stock to improving the town centre. The continued engagement of civil society was the overarching strategic priority and a not-for-profit organisation was founded by civil society, business and public sector actors to oversee and guide strategy implementation. One of the first actions resulting from the strategy process was to establish a centre for volunteering led by older people and based in a building owned by the municipality. By co-ordinating existing volunteer activity, a wide-ranging programme of services was organised. This included visitation services to reach isolated or sick elders, art and craft courses, after school clubs, language courses for refugees, reading circles, DIY workshops and much more. Physical improvements were also organised, such as improving public seating, creating a communal barbeque on the riverbank, and brightening up the city centre with plants. There was no project budget to resource these activities. Collaboration between volunteers and officials was based almost entirely on support in kind, which included adjusting mainstream service provision, so that volunteers could complement public services where possible. A pivotal project which nurtured co-productive relationships early on was the pedestrianisation of the main shopping street. For many years, retailers and residents had called for improvements, but due to the dire financial situation, proposals for improvements were postponed regularly. A scheme for

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pedestrianisation was developed in meetings between officials, councillors, residents living in the centre, shop owners and trade bodies. To implement the scheme the mayor called on citizens to get their ‘hands dirty’ and arranged for street closures at weekends. With machinery, tools and building materials provided by the municipality and local construction companies, the first 200 metres of the street were re-surfaced in 2007 by residents, traders, municipal workers and politicians. It took three further years for the 800 metres long street to be turned into an attractive pedestrianised zone. In the course of the project, traders made available their privately owned parking areas, so that these spaces could be integrated into the pedestrian streetscape which now includes planting and seating areas that are maintained by both the municipality and the volunteer exchange. In 2013 the municipality secured a small amount of funding from the Land (regional) government to temporarily pay shop owners a small fee when they made an empty retail unit available for a period of 6–12 weeks. Local entrepreneurs could rent the units, all of which were in prime locations along the recently pedestrianised retail street, for e2 per square metre. The municipality then handled the contractual arrangements with property owners. This ‘pop-up shop’ initiative created six permanent new retailers in the town centre and now forms part of the economic development services provided by the municipality. Table 24.1 illustrates a ‘light structure’ which allows co-producers to contribute at each level of co-production. We can also see that motivations to collaborate can range from strategic to very specific goals and that these are likely to differ between professionals and citizens. What the relational leadership perspective highlights is that differing motivations are bounded by goals that co-producers generate in a light structure context. The power to contribute, block or withdraw can be found on both sides. The example of Altena illustrates that power relations are not always controlled by transformational leaders or experts as acknowledged professionals in their field. Instead, we see that professionals as well as citizens can be powerful actors and that their respective powers are subject to negotiation at all levels of co-production. In the next section we explore how context, motivation and power help us to explore the main stages of co-production.

Relational Leadership at Different Stages of Co-production Building on the work by Bovaird and Loeffler (Bovaird and Loeffler 2016; Bovaird 2007), Nabatchi et al. (2017) combine three levels of co-production with four stages of the service cycle. These stages reflect the temporal nature of co-production: co-commissioning, the collaborative identification and prioritisation of services by professionals and citizens; co-design, the creation and planning of a service; co-delivery, joint activities between professionals and citizens through which a service or public good is provided and co-assessment,

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Table 24.1 Applying dimensions of relational leadership to different levels of coproduction

Individual

Group

Collective

Context

Motivation

Power

Professional and shop owner come together to explore how retail space can be made available for the planned ‘pop-up shop’ initiative Groups are formed according to collectively agreed priorities, such as the volunteer exchange, ‘pop-up shops’ or pedestrianisation. Groups use formats and processes that reflect the nature of the initiative and preferences of participants Workshops which include professional, political and civil society actors are facilitated by independent experts. ‘Blue sky thinking’ and radical departures from status quo are encouraged

Professional and shop owner share motivation to increase footfall and enhance attractiveness of town centre

Professional and shop owner have the power to make concessions to reach agreement or to walk away with no deal

Working groups are attended according to expertise and interest of participants. Citizens and professionals might have very specific and differing motivations and they find ways to collaborate to achieve these

Professionals and citizens negotiate the ideas and priorities in working groups and jointly agree the rules which govern their work

Strategic perspectives are deliberated. Professionals and citizens share the goal of improving the quality of life in their town, even though their motivations for doing so might differ

Actors have different expertise, influence and views on priorities but none dominate the collective co-production process

the monitoring and evaluation of services. We now illustrate how a relational leadership might assist us in analysing the leadership in relation to the following 4 stages of co-production. Co-commissioning In the case of Altena the context for co-commissioning was characterised by an openness to new ideas and senior officials being prepared to experiment with new ways of deciding what should be done. 30 years of continuous decline had made it plain that the municipality was insufficiently ‘powerful’ to bring about needed changes on its own. Citizens were asked to share responsibility for identifying what needed to change and had the power, alongside politicians, to determine the strategic priorities. Citizens felt strongly about retaining and improving services while officials were desperate to reduce liabilities for oversized services, buildings and public spaces. The co-commissioning process therefore was conflictual, and the facilitation by independent experts was an important element in the development of the Altena 2015 strategy which set out priorities citizens and officials could agree on. This stage of

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co-production relates most clearly to the collective and group levels because all citizens were able to contribute to strategic deliberations, and at group level citizens took the lead in the working groups, which developed detailed proposals such as the volunteer exchange, ‘pop-up shop’ and pedestrianisation initiatives described above. Each new initiative had to be cost-neutral, meaning that the municipality was not able to borrow money, or reduce statutory services in order to finance new non-mandatory services. The collaboration with citizens consequently had to go beyond the co-commissioning stage and involve implementation. Co-design The volunteer exchange is a good example of service co-design. When the decision was taken that there was a need to co-ordinate third sector responses to problems, there was no structure or process that citizens or professionals could adapt to create this new service. Instead actors were faced with severely constrained municipal resources and fiercely independent voluntary organisations. Thus, the context for co-designing a new service was challenging but had limited institutional implications because the volunteer exchange did not attempt to be an umbrella organisation representing the local voluntary sector. The focus was firmly on doing practical things that would change social and environmental conditions. Both officials and citizens wanted to increase volunteering, especially by older people, who made up a large proportion of the population, as they felt that volunteers were one of the most important yet under-used resources available to address the multitude of social and environmental problems in Altena. Only through sharing resources and knowledge was this achievable. Citizens were leading their volunteer exchange which had no paid staff but operated from an office provided by the municipality, which covered heating and telephone costs as well as insurance. There was no funding for activities by the municipality, everything had to be done with the limited resources the volunteer exchange could secure through grant applications and appeals. Co-design in this case was in part a collective but mainly a group level activity. The collective element refers to the creation of a new organisation, the volunteer exchange, where citizens, politicians and professionals designed the blueprint for the volunteer exchange. The group level of co-production is evident in collaborations between specific volunteer groups undertaking, for example, the maintenance of the planting containers in the town centre, while municipal workers re-stock and repair the containers. Leadership here is shared too, with volunteers taking the lead on decisions as to when and how to maintain the planters, and municipal workers taking the lead on re-stocking and repairing them.

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Co-delivery Pedestrianising the central shopping street was a priority for citizens and municipality and over the years a number of plans had been drawn up, but none had come to fruition. There was no ‘master plan’ which the municipality tried to deliver, hence the context for engaging citizens in the scheme was flexible. The municipality put in place organisational measures, such as road closure orders, provided insurance, materials and supervised the use of machinery while shop owners and citizens, including volunteering municipal officials, took up old surfaces and paved the street. Professionals did have a leading role in ensuring that relevant construction standards were met, and in doing so both affirmed power relations between professional and citizen but also reversed institutional power relations, for example ‘instructing’ the mayor how the paving had to be installed. Not all shop owners and residents living in the centre were strongly motivated to contribute, but those actively involved were able repeatedly to co-deliver this physical improvement over four consecutive years. Although there was a collective dimension to codelivery, in this case the primary level of co-production was at both the group and the individual levels. Unlike co-commissioning and co-design, this stage of co-production was characterised by professionals being in the lead, setting out what should be done and how it should be done, with citizens as followers. But they codelivered in a ‘light structure’ where professionals had no positional power over volunteers, and the co-producers shared the motivations to enhance the street with a minimum of funding. Another interesting observation in regard to this stage of co-production is that co-delivery does not necessarily result in public goods or services. The ‘pop-up shop’ example illustrates that municipal professionals and shop owners can co-design the opportunity for an entrepreneur to deliver a private service. Such a service is co-delivered because the municipality handles the contractual and insurance matters on behalf of the shop owners to enable the entrepreneurs to provide a service that customers then pay for. Co-assessment In the case of Altena there are no formal processes that would facilitate the co-assessment of services that are being co-produced. The volunteer exchange is continuously adjusting its service offering in response to needs and to new volunteering initiatives that spring up. Its organisational structures, in contrast, have remained largely unchanged; it remains entirely run by volunteers and the municipality continues to provide premises, financial and marketing support, while financial resources come from external funders. The shopping street is in a constant process of change, driven by citizens and shop owners. Volunteers lead on the management of the planting of containers, new flower containers

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are added and sometimes removed by municipal workers. Volunteers established and now maintain a new seating area and small open space with support from the municipality. Decisions on improvements emerge from informal exchanges between shop owners, residents and volunteers and are agreed informally with officials from the municipality, who in turn activate formal procedures to facilitate the desired changes. The ‘pop-up shop’ initiative is now part of the economic development services offered by the municipality but continues to operate on the co-commissioning, co-design and co-delivery principles set out above. These examples suggest that the context in which professionals and citizens assess the services they have co-produced is not dominated by a particular framework or rules, rather co-producers seem to make corrections as they see fit. While citizens and professionals might not fully share values and perspectives, they share an interest in making sure that the services to which they contribute actually work. Each is contributing according to their abilities and interests, based on what appears to be a rather ‘subjective’ assessment of what needs to be done. This short case study would suggest that such assessments may not be collaborative in nature, but they are not hierarchical or conflictual either, pointing to a relational approach towards solving the knotty problem of making judgement about what works and how well it works. An important limitation in these informal approaches to assessing ‘what works’ and ‘how well it works’ is that it is primarily the co-producers who make those judgements. While co-producers are accountable to their stakeholders, be they the municipality as the employer or the people on whose behalf volunteers do their work, this may not ensure that recipients of a co-produced service have a role in assessing it. These examples around the Four Co’s in the Altena case study illustrate how the question of ‘who is in the lead?’ raises questions around power, motivation and structure as key variables for the analysis of the different stages and levels of co-production. In adult social care, for example, the individual level might be the predominant level at which co-production happens, including the commissioning and assessment of services when thinking about individualised care budgets. A different example would be housing services where we might expect a stronger emphasis on co-producing through groups. What our analysis shows is that a context which provides flexibility for actors to shape the co-production, shared motivations to achieve agreed goals and negotiated power relations are important analytical dimensions for all stages and levels of co-production. The model below illustrates this. It also shows that co-production is not a linear or one-directional process, but rather that every stage in the co-production process has the potential to feedback learning on how to improve it. Given the dynamic complexity of collaborative service provision, it would be reasonable to assume that learning is communicated informally and opportunistically by citizens and professionals to stakeholders, thus subordinating formal to informal feedback and action mechanisms (Fig. 24.1).

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Fig. 24.1 Dimensions of relational leadership perspective in co-production

Analysing co-production through the lens of relational leadership enables us to draw inferences about barriers and facilitators in relation to levels and stages of co-production. The examples given here suggest that leading in coproduction processes requires a context which resembles a ‘light structure’ in which citizen and professional co-producers can deliberate on their goals and motivations in groups, the wider collective of stakeholders, as well as individually. Negotiating power relationships can encompass issues of governance, involving the electorate and political representatives at the collective level, as well as the agreement of rules on how the deliberation should happen among professionals and service users at the group level or individual level. Motivations seem to differ among citizens as well as professional co-producers but being able to relate individual interest to previously agreed higher goals would appear to facilitate a sharing of leadership functions among co-producers.

Implications for Research and Practice In this chapter, we proposed three analytical dimensions rooted in relational leadership theory for exploring leading at different levels and stages of coproduction and illustrated some of the main theoretical implications of these distinctions. In the next section, we discuss two additional challenges for theory and practice. Changing Professional Mindsets Dominant mindsets about values, attitudes and beliefs are difficult to change, as they form an inherent part of people’s identities and their understanding of how the world works. Co-production practice requires organisational processes and individual skills that depart in significant ways from mainstream established practices. Tuurnas in this volume identifies key skills that

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professionals need to have to co-produce, such as being able to segment their co-producers according to need, knowledge, roles and skills, as well as having the capacity to enable citizens to co-produce. Tuurnas, among others (Ferlie and Ongaro 2015) points to the importance of organisational learning and support for professionals to bring organisational capabilities in line with changing demands and expectations. In regard to leading public services, Alford and O’Flynn (2012, 241) suggest that professionals need to be skilled negotiators, influence formal and positional power and understand relationships through ‘shared goals, trust and empathy’, and to be able to navigate environments with dispersed power configurations. Their argument resonates with the principles of relational leadership and practices where leading is shared between the professional and citizen co-producers. The analytical lens presented here would be applicable to a wide range of services at different levels and stages of service provision. Exploring Motivations of Citizen Co-producers Changing professional mindsets might help overcome some of the formidable barriers associated with professional practice such as risk aversion, fear of losing status and control and the difficulties in evidencing the benefits of coproduction (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012, 45–49). However, it is conceivable, and this volume contains a range of examples (for example, the chapters by Peter Jackson and Trui Steen) that citizens might refrain from co-producing even when professionals encourage them to do so, thus becoming a barrier to co-production themselves. This may not be the result of particular actions taken by professionals or of the context in which co-production is enacted but be rooted in citizens’ motivations. Studies on citizens’ motivations to co-produce show that they are not simply maximising material benefits, as assumed by public choice theory, but show complex combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards as well as social and expressive values (Alford 2002; Vanleene et al. 2015). Research on volunteering provides perhaps the most exhaustive analysis of what motivates citizens to contribute to the provision of services (Rochester et al. 2010; Gaskin 2003) but as Pestoff reminds us, the citizen co-producers who are the users of a service are different from volunteers in that they not only contribute to the provision of the service but also directly benefit from the service (Pestoff 2017). How motivation for volunteers or users differs at different levels and stages of co-production is an area that would benefit from further research. Despite its contribution to co-production theory, our analytical lens has its own limitations. We have drawn primarily on the social constructionist strand of the relational leadership discourse (Hosking 2011; Ospina et al. 2012; Ospina 2017). Therefore, other relational leadership perspectives, such as the one that explores emotions (e.g. Ashkanasy et al. 2012) might generate additional analytical frames.

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CHAPTER 25

Skilling and Motivating Staff for Co-production Sanna Tuurnas

Introduction In the context of public services, co-production mostly takes place between public service personnel and citizens, service users or a group of citizens. This chapter examines co-production from the viewpoint of public service personnel. Despite the fact that co-production has become very popular across the globe, for many people working in public service organisations co-production still remains a ‘black box’ and a novel approach. Moreover, co-production is not necessarily an easy issue for staff. This can explained by professionals experiencing fear of losing power over decisions, or even their jobs, or through the lack of understanding or experience of co-production. (see Bovaird 2007; Bovaird and Löffler 2012; Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Tuurnas 2015). Furthermore, there is a consensus among academics that co-production does not just happen automatically, but requires skilling and motivation, on the part of both personnel and citizen co-producers (e.g. Bovaird 2007; Bovaird and Löffler 2012; Steen and Tuurnas 2018; Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Verschuere et al. 2012). For instance, Bovaird and Löffler (2012, 1130) have recognised the ‘need to develop the professional skills to mainstream coproduction’. Therefore, there is a need to understand better the process of co-production from the staff’s perspective, focusing on questions of skilling and motivating them to co-produce. S. Tuurnas (B) University of Vaasa, Vaasa, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_25

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Against this backdrop, this chapter focuses on the question, how can staff be skilled and motivated to co-produce? The chapter starts by identifying the core skills that staff need in different types of co-production. These skills are categorised as segmenting skills, communication skills and enabling skills. All these skills are interlinked, supporting the motivation of citizen co-producers. The chapter also discusses how staff can be motivated to co-produce. Here, it considers the special angles of professional boundaries and identity work. As will be demonstrated, crossing and transforming boundaries between staff and citizen co-producers can be seen as a necessity for successful co-production. It should be noted that the focus on public service personnel is naturally very broad and it is difficult to make unambiguous statements about it for several reasons. First, public service personnel may refer to a very heterogeneous group of public service staff; nurses, teachers, social workers, librarians, youth workers, police officers, prison guards, teachers and many more included. Alongside different occupations, the focus on public service personnel refers to various levels of public service duties: from street-level actors to commissioners, planning officers to senior managers. Here, front-line staff often have the advantage in co-production, as they are naturally more in touch with service users and often know them due to their work at street-level. Then again, co-production might appear different to the senior managers and commissioners, who—due to their managerial duties—look at co-production rather through a ‘systems’ than a ‘people’ lens. They may also not have much real-life street-level contact with their co-production target groups. Third, in times of marketisation and collaboration in public services, it should be noted that not all public service personnel actually work in public organisations—they also work in private or third-sector organisations, which can have various cultures and readiness for co-production. Keeping these differences in mind, the chapter gives examples from this extensive category of public service personnel, limiting the examination broadly to those staff members who work for public service providers and for the public. In general, this research is conceptual in nature, drawing together studies and theories concerning public service personnel and co-production, mainly from the co-production literature, but, as co-production is a multifaceted concept, the chapter covers different streams of literature, such as innovation and professionalism research and health care studies, in providing a robust base for the arguments presented.

What Are the Core Skills Required from Staff for Co-production? In co-production, the logic of service production moves from traditional idea of delivering public services for the public towards the idea of delivering public services with, or even by the public (Bovaird 2007; Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Pestoff 2012). This logic requires a new relational approach

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between citizens and staff in public service organisations. New types of citizenpersonnel partnerships appear, as citizens take up a more important role in public service delivery. For instance, citizens may act as volunteers alongside public service personnel. Here, the citizens are nor subordinates nor clients, but partners, who may possess different knowledge and expertise to the personnel, but all the same should be treated as equal partners in public service delivery and design. Moreover, in co-production, citizens, both as individual service users or as members of community groups (through community coproduction; cf. Bovaird and Löffler 2012) are given an opportunity to use their local and situational knowledge in various development activities concerning public spaces or services (see also Brandsen and Honingh 2016; Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Tuurnas et al. 2016). These examples help to illustrate the various roles which citizens play in co-production. In certain types of co-production, citizens are service users or clients (Alford 1998). In some other types, they may be residents (Tuurnas 2016), volunteers or leaders of pop-up activities (Botero et al. 2012). Moreover, co-production can take place in various phases of service delivery. As the literature illustrates, co-production extends across the full value chain of service planning, design, commissioning, managing, delivering, monitoring and evaluation activities (Bovaird 2007; Verschuere et al. 2012). Especially in top-down approaches of co-production (i.e. approaches and models where coproduction is initiated by public organisations), it is often for the personnel of the public sector organisations to understand whose contributions are needed, when and how. Thus, co-production requires from the staff a thorough understanding of the service chains, but also the various modes of citizenship. For this, staff need to be skilled in segmenting the right citizen or user groups, who have the right kind of situational knowledge for realising co-production. Segmenting Skills Related to the implementation of co-production, Alford and O’Flynn (2012, 242–243) underline the need for staff to segment client groups in order to understand and meet their special needs. Different user groups may also have specific knowledge, and depending on the focus of co-production, successful co-production may require different approaches and different platforms to reach the right user/citizen groups (discussed more specifically below). To give an example, users of social services consist of various user groups, such as elderly, families with small children or youth. These groups can have divergent preferences in their use services or their meetings with staff (e.g. online/faceto-face). Some user groups may also need more support and encouragement to co-produce than others. Here, it is often the responsibility of staff to identify the gaps, such as language support for immigrants (cf. Moynihan and Thomas 2013). Moreover, it is essential for staff to understand and know their target groups. For instance, according to the five nation study by Parrado et al. (2013), different citizen groups may be especially likely to take part in

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different co-production activities, with women and elderly most willing to coproduce overall. Thus, staff need to be skilled for understanding the various roles which user groups play in co-production, and in identifying key issues in motivating certain citizen/user groups. Moreover, it is also noteworthy that in certain types of co-production activities, such as in developing built environments, citizens possess different roles as clients, residents, voters, patients or obligatees (cf. Alford 2002; Bäcklund et al. 2014), holding different expectations towards public service organisations. To demonstrate the importance of segmenting in such cases, a neighbourhood development project (Tuurnas 2015, 2016) can be used as an example. In the project, a group of local government personnel attempted to create new types of interactions between local government and citizens, at the same time trying to renew services in a specific neighbourhood. Contacting the right groups proved to be difficult, as it was not always clear whether it was the wider citizenry living in the area or specific user groups whom they wanted to reach. Also the relationship between the co-producing parties (staff and citizens) vary, depending on their roles as co-producers (Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Thomas 2013). For example, prisoners are obligatees in relation to prison authorities. However, they may be asked to participate voluntarily in co-creation projects, aiming to improve their return to social life after their time in prison. Here, the roles of the prisoners shift from obligatees to volunteering co-producers (cf. Brandsen and Honingh 2016). This kind of role change requires a different kind of approach from prison officials, compared to their everyday encounters with the prisoners. Furthermore, segmenting as a skill underlines the importance of understanding the specific points in the service delivery chain at which contributions from citizens are needed, from planning to delivering, and monitoring to evaluation of the services for co-production (cf. Bovaird 2007). These different points in the service chains also entail various roles for citizens, necessitating different amounts of citizen contribution and effort and, accordingly, different methods and co-production strategies (Bovaird and Löffler 2012; Alford 2002; Verschuere et al. 2012). For example, co-production in the planning phase of the service delivery chain can include methods such as participatory budgeting or open design laboratories, which require short-term commitment from citizen co-producers. Then again, some other forms of co-production, such as volunteering, may require more long-term commitment and training, which therefore also calls for quite a different approach from staff. (cf. Tuurnas et al. 2016). Furthermore, when citizen contributions are needed for evaluation of a certain service, the target group may be easily limited to those who have used the services but, when co-production is planned for engaging residents more generally (e.g. in designing a public space), the target group may be broader and more difficult to define and limit. Therefore, as Thomas (2013, 789) notes, the agencies should think thoroughly about what they ‘need or want to ask of the public’. Often, this is no longer simply a matter of segmenting, but also requires various communication skills, another essential skill on the part of staff.

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Communication Skills Communication skills are strongly linked to segmenting, calling for different approaches and strategic understanding of communication in relation to different citizenship roles. Also, as pointed out in the previous section, citizens prefer different channels of communication: some may favour online communication, whereas others may find this difficult and unreliable. Therefore, it is important to understand that communication varies extensively across diverse types of co-production. Table 25.1 offers one way to present the nature of communication which different types of co-production entail. First, when co-production is based on forming partnerships between public service personnel and volunteering citizens (co-production as public-people partnerships ), communication is based on dialogue—it cannot be based merely on one-way communication from one side or another. Here, the staff need to be skilled to meet the volunteers, not as subordinates, but as experts-byexperience who can bring needed quality and quantity of inputs to the services to which they contribute (van Bochove et al. 2016; Claxton-Oldfield and Claxton-Oldfield 2008; Tulloch et al. 2015; Tuurnas et al. 2016; Verschuere et al. 2012). The case study of a mediation service (Tuurnas et al. 2016) can be used as an example of the type of dialogue needed in the these public-people partnerships. Here, volunteering citizens act as mediators (or ‘conciliators’) between an offender and victim, seeking conciliation between the parties in the mediation. This empirical study noted that, although the staff are often in charge of the process, they should give the volunteers space to create their own solutions, or find the best solutions through dialogue. However, the staff members themselves declined an authoritative role in the mediation process, in order not to harm the creativity of volunteering mediators in the mediation process. At the same time, as the case study by Williams et al. (2015) illustrates, volunteers need to know the limits of their rights as volunteers—a member of an American neighbourhood watch group who shot a ‘suspicious’ teenager clearly had not understood those limits. Therefore, it cannot be underlined strongly enough, how important it is that public service staff, such as the police, give clear instructions (sometimes non-negotiable) to volunteers, in order prevent excesses in their use of authority (as well as to keep them safe) (cf. Verschuere et al. 2012, 6). The second type of co-production, presented in Table 25.1, concerns user-centred service processes . In this type of co-production, communication skills focus especially on the staff–service user relationship (not necessarily focusing so much on volunteer-staff co-production), that should ideally be based on empathetic encounters and equal dialogue. Bartels (2014, 669) offers a valuable conceptualisation of a core skill for staff in this respect, viz. communicative capacity: [communicative capacity refers to] ‘the ability to recognize and break through dominant communicative patterns by adapting the nature, tone, and conditions of conversations to the situation at hand’. Thus, staff need the skill to ‘read’ patients or service users and to interact accordingly.

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Table 25.1 Different types of co-production and communication skills Concepts

Rationales for co-production

Communication skills between public service personnel and citizens Often based on dialogue to frame and negotiate co-production tasks Equal partnership requires dialogue skills Clear guidelines are needed in public tasks Based on dialogue between different stakeholders for value-creation Skills are needed so that encounters with the clients are empathetic and empowering Based on interaction, but the processes do not necessarily include dialogue Securing representativeness calls for skills related to strategic understanding of various communication channels Securing legitimacy calls for expectation management skills

Co-production as public-people partnerships

Volunteering, active citizenship

Promoting volunteering—citizen’s role as a partner for public service organisations to enrich and ensure the quality or quantity of services

Co-production as user-centred service processes

Co-creation, co-design

Service-user centeredness in public services to create efficient and effective services that empower the users

Co-production as a way to enhance participatory democracy

Citizen participation, engagement

Enhancing legitimacy of public activities. Fostering democracy and empowerment through citizen consultation

Source Adapted from Tuurnas (2020, 143)

Here, it is also important for staff to step down from the authoritative expert role, and give room for the service users to exercise empowerment. For instance, users of social services can be asked how would they like to proceed in their situation, possibly offering them advice to select the right path to follow (see, for example, QCOSS Community Door eTraining 2018). Also co-design methods can be useful. Co-design is a valuable way of understanding service users’ or citizens’ needs, through drawing service paths or gathering stories from service users. Branco et al. (2017) report how co-design was used to

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improve care of people with dementia; patients and their families were asked to co-design services with clinicians, whose role was to evaluate the feasibility of the activities proposed by the patient and his/her significant people, and assist in implementing them. The third type of co-production, as shown in Table 25.1, concerns communication with citizens in situations where the aim is to enhance participatory democracy by communication with a wide array of publics. Citizen consultation of this type can only be referred to as ‘co-production’ when the contributions of citizens are significant (cf. Bovaird 2007), but when this is the case, co-production often touches the mid- and top-level personnel groups, such as planning officers. Here, the target group is much wider than in the previous types of co-production: staff may need to reach the whole citizenry living in a particular area to secure representativeness and equality and to prevent only the loudest voices being heard (cf. Lowndes and Sullivan 2008; Jones and Ormston 2014). Consequently, public sector personnel need to be skilled in using various arenas and platforms in order to communicate with wide audiences. For instance, communication skills may be needed when asking the public their perceptions about neighbourhood development (cf. Lowndes and Sullivan 2008; Tuurnas 2016). Interaction is thus required between public officials and the residents, e.g. in citizen hearings and surveys, but the process itself does not necessarily lead to dialogue (although ideally there would be time and space for discussion and feedback, too). This also applies to managing expectations raised through participation: although it might be tempting to promise remarkable impacts to motivate people to participate, false expectations may have contrary effects than wished for. Tuurnas (2016, 5) found that local government personnel in a neighbourhood project had awkward consequences after providing opportunities for citizen consultation. After sending out surveys and organising workshops, the project members had a variety of different ideas about how to improve the neighbourhood and, thus, felt pressured to act accordingly. However, implementation capacity was lacking: the project group had only limited financial means to realise the ideas suggested by residents. Even the smallest suggestions, such as increasing the colourfulness of the neighbourhood, proved difficult to realise, not to mention wider questions of improving safety, for instance. Here, the skills of expectation management (Olkkonen and Luomaaho 2014, 234–235) could be valuable for staff in co-production. As the authors explain: ‘In essence, an organization with good expectation management matches behaviour with what is communicated and avoids creating unintended or misleading expectations’. Overall, the skills of public sector personnel in interacting with citizens seem to play a key role in fostering co-production and participation (Marschall 2004; Jones and Ormston 2014). For instance, the study of Marschall (2004) underlines the importance of governmental actors formally connecting with citizens in order to stimulate participation and mobilisation of citizens. Communication skills are not limited only to creating interaction and dialogue

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between citizens and public sector personnel, but also between different groups of citizens. This notion shifts attention from communication alone to the wider skills of facilitation and coordination—the enabling skills. Enabling Skills There is a general understanding in co-production literature that the role of public service personnel shifts from offering top-down expertise towards coordination of co-production (cf. van Bochove et al. 2016; Bovaird 2007; Verschuere et al. 2012). As noted before, public service staff not only mobilise and activate citizens to co-produce but also facilitate and coordinate collaboration between individuals and public service organisations and between different groups of citizens. Especially in a top-down perspective to coproduction, the role of staff is also to take into account the expectations of the public organisation in terms of whether, what and with whom to co-produce (cf. Alford and O’Flynn 2012). This top-down view of co-production offers less room to examine citizen activism and bottom-up co-production initiatives, but in such cases, especially if citizen activation is a desired outcome, the role of staff can be to facilitate and motivate people by ‘bridging and bonding’ communities and people. For instance, in local government activities, staff try to bring together different communities and residents, acting as facilitators of community activities (Jones and Ormston 2014; Lowndes and Sullivan 2008; Marschall 2004; Tuurnas 2016; Wagenaar 2007). The importance of staff as stimulating forces for creating ‘active citizenship’ gains support from the study of Jones and Ormston (2014), who emphasise that to access the potential of active communities a lot depends on the local authorities’ willingness to foster cooperation, which requires skills and the development of trust. Linked to this, the concepts of ‘asset-based approach’ and ‘strength-based approach’ can offer a new way of enabling as an overall task for public bodies, underlining the importance of individual and community assets for creating better communities and services (cf. Fox 2017). Instead of focusing on the problems and needs of communities, the approach focuses rather on what individuals or communities can do, with the right kinds of support. This approach can be a useful hands-on enabling tool, especially for those in managerial positions. Particularly in times of austerity, local government officials and politicians may become more interested in using the asset-based approach to redesign the local service systems to make use of the local assets, which are already there, but have not been sufficiently utilised. This can be done, for instance, by making a living map of local assets; segmenting and identifying the strengths of communities or user groups; and enabling them to act. However, it should be underlined that this approach also requires investment and effort, e.g. in early intervention, and thus does not conform to the logic of merely cutting and saving money (Fox 2017).

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Moreover, the asset-based approach applies not only to community coproduction or to the managerial level of staff, but also to individual encounters on the frontline. As Fox (2017, 2) notes: ‘An asset-based public body does not have “customers” (whose only responsibility is to pay taxes), rather it views everyone, including people with long term support needs, as citizens, with rights and responsibilities’. Thus, enabling skills are also needed on an individual level. With the increase in self-care, this enabling role falls naturally on health care service staff (cf. Oudshoorn 2012; Vallo Hult et al. 2017). Wu et al. (2014, 195) studying self-care in diabetes, highlight the enabling role of health care staff, especially through their ability to design education programmes and interventions for promoting self-care. In this kind of role, staff also need to use their enabling skills to tackle resistance among patients who may feel that they are given the tasks that should be performed by public service personnel, for instance, by monitoring or measuring their own blood pressure or body weight as a part of their treatment (Oudshoorn 2012). Hence, it is important that staff are also able to motivate patients to take responsibility over their own health. Especially codesign skills may become useful. As Sarasohn-Kahn (2012, 18) shows, users who co-designed services will also be more prone to find motivation and capability to co-manage their own health. Overall, the shifting responsibilities and roles involved in co-production may be a difficult issue for both patients and staff. Particularly when coproduction is clearly a result of austerity, citizens might suspect that government is merely transferring responsibility, while it withdraws from service production (cf. Moynihan and Thomas 2013; Oudshoorn 2012). Regular staff may also feel betrayed or fear losing their jobs due to austerity measures disguised as co-production—sometimes also rightly so (cf. Blackladder and Jackson 2011). In this case it can be difficult to motivate staff to engage eagerly in co-production. However, this is often still not the case, and coproduction can be beneficial both to the work of staff and to the quality of the service. So, as staff play a key role in making co-production work, it is necessary to look at their motivation, too.

Motivating Staff to Co-produce: Professional Boundaries and How to Transform Them? In this section, the motivational side of co-production by staff is examined from the viewpoint of (professional) boundaries and the importance of identity work. Whereas boundaries help to explain the potential problems in co-production, identity work is presented as a potential solution to tackle those problems. Indeed, the motivation for staff to co-produce may be hindered due to protection of professional boundaries, caused by fear or lack of understanding about the benefits of co-production (van Bochove et al. 2016; Tuurnas 2015). Maintaining or opening the boundaries also defines to which extent collaboration can actually be realised (Rashman et al. 2009).

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In co-production, the boundaries between the staff and citizen or client co-producers are at the core. Then, how do such boundaries appear in reality? Here, a study by ClaxtonOldfield and Claxton-Oldfield (2008) provides an illustrative warning. Their research on volunteers in hospice palliative care showed that professionals can defend their boundaries—for instance, by not inviting volunteers to team meetings. Professionals also used their discretion as way to exclude volunteers by raising concerns about patient confidentiality. As a result, and not surprisingly, volunteers felt valued by the patients and the families, but not by doctors, social workers and nurses (ibid., 125). Overall, several research studies suggest that co-production with volunteers may be seen as a threat to the status and role of staff (cf. van Bochove et al. 2016; Merrell 2000). However, there are also research findings that indicate the opposite. For instance, as van Bochove and colleagues (2016) demonstrate in their empirical research, professionals working in the field of social services seem to gain more upgrading than downgrading due to task-division with volunteers (see also Tulloch et al. 2015). First, this is due to the possibility for staff to focus on more specialised tasks, as some of the easier tasks are handed over to the volunteering co-producers. Second, co-ordination of volunteers can be seen as an upgrade of the tasks performed by public service personnel. Third, volunteering citizens can also help improve performance and quality through providing additional skills that are needed in the hectic work of caring (see van Bochove et al. 2016; Tulloch et al. 2015; Tuurnas et al. 2016). This is a notion that could be used in motivating staff to accept volunteers in their ‘professional domains’. What is more, it is also important to communicate to staff that co-production does not lessen their value to the organisation. In this way, and through positive experiences of crossing and transforming boundaries, staff may feel more open towards co-production. However, to make this transformation happen, there may be a need for identity work. In her longitudinal in-depth field study, Lifshitz-Assaf (2018) highlights the importance of professional identity work for transforming professional boundaries. In the research of NASA’s open innovation model and its effects on R&D professionals, it was shown that professionals’ identity is essential in the adoption of change and innovation (ibid., 772). It was also shown that those professionals who went through the identity refocusing work deconstructed their boundaries in a way that allowed them truly to adopt external knowledge and to share their own internal knowledge. This study also helps in understanding the profound changes needed in the self-perceptions of public service personnel. When aiming to open professional boundaries, it is important to focus on the question of why people do their work, instead of focusing on the question, how they do it. Her study also underlines the importance of changing the working environment as a supporting element to open up: those who had several working roles across projects, units and disciplines, were more prone to ‘refocus their professional identity and dismantle their knowledge boundaries’ (ibid., 771–772).

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Finally, in motivating staff to open up to co-production, the role of organisational support cannot be underestimated. It is not just the individual staff members who will need to learn new skills, but often there is a need for organisational learning alongside individual learning (Rashman et al. 2009; Tuurnas 2015). As research has shown, co-production may clash with some core values which guide the staff working for the public. These include dilemmas related to representativeness and neutrality of public service activities (cf. Jaspers and Steen 2018; Tuurnas 2015). Here, it is important for managers to negotiate risks related to co-production with the staff (Brown and Osborne 2013). In the same way, organisations which develop an open culture and demonstrate credible commitment towards co-production by adjusting structures and procedures (e.g. incentive structures and supportive performance management) can encourage and motivate staff to co-produce (Steen and Tuurnas 2018; Tuurnas 2015; Verschuere et al. 2012; Voorberg et al. 2014).

Drawing Together the Findings: Skilling and Motivating the Personnel for Co-production This chapter has focused on examining the skilling and motivating of public service personnel for co-production. First, I have presented core skills needed in co-production, categorised as segmenting, communication and enabling skills . While this kind of typology is certainly not the only way of listing the key skills of professionals, it offers one window into examining the various changes and challenges that co-production brings about to the customary work of public service personnel. When discussing and presenting these skills, it also becomes clear that co-production is a wide and complex issue for the staff to undertake in general. Second, the chapter examined the motivation side of public service personnel from the perspective of boundaries and identity work. This provides a reflective viewpoint for understanding the in-depth changes that coproduction might catalyse among staff. It is essential to understand that allowing, and indeed even inviting, citizens to enter the traditional professional domains of public service workers can be a fundamental change in the identity of these staff. Therefore, the role of managers and supporting organisational structures was also highlighted. Moreover, in line with Bovaird and Löffler (2012) the chapter strongly underlines a need for motivational work and revised training for public service personnel. So, what exactly could be done in organisations which wish to train staff to be successful co-producers? To answer this question, I present three hands-on suggestions that can be useful in this respect. First, there is evidently a need for interaction training for staff. As Vallo Hult et al. (2017) show in relation to physicians and digitalisation of health care, a variety of new skills starting from advancing IT skills and learning to use new systems and databases is needed. Moreover, appropriate governance of the role which ICT increasingly plays in modern occupations, helping staff to

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communicate with citizens in their different roles, is needed. Moreover, Vallo Hult et al. (2017) underline that professional education is lagging behind by focusing on ‘formal lectures and learning by heart’ and on medical knowledge to treat patients, neglecting education for working in an environment of complex situations with active patients, using new (digitalised) platforms and crossing new boundaries of professional and non-professional expertise. All in all, formal education and training organisations can be seen as core players in skilling and motivating staff for co-production. Second, co-production requires new attitudes towards citizens and service users, focusing on the behavioural aspect of skilling and motivating staff. But how can attitudes be changed? As noted in this chapter, empathy plays a crucial role in making co-production encounters successful, helping the collaborating parties to trust each other (see, for example, O’Learyet al. 2012). Empathy can be seen as a personal quality, but it can also be enhanced by training. For instance, in the study by Henry-Tillman et al. (2001) students were asked to shadow their patients throughout their treatment. This way, the students learned to see their patients as people, not merely as symptoms. Also social media channels, such as patient blogs, may help health care staff to understand the experiential side of the illnesses they treat, and thereby may increase empathy (Thoër et al. 2017). Overall, these findings suggest that understanding the entirety of a person’s life beyond the symptoms or social problems seems to be crucial for increasing empathy. Also co-design methods, such as creating service paths or using patient stories, can be useful in bringing the worlds of staff and service users and citizens closer to one another, motivating both parties for co-production. Third, it is important to understand that skilling and motivation to coproduce not only stems from formal training or using specific methods. The role of learning by doing is crucial; co-production-oriented organisations can give their staff opportunities to learn about co-production by organising opportunities to experiment. Moreover, in a networked environment, the staff can also be encouraged and motivated to co-produce through learning from each other. Tuurnas (2015) shows that increased interaction among public service personnel, representing different fields, seemed to support individual staff members in learning about co-production from each other, and then potentially adapting and adopting the learned methods in their own fields. Finally, the chapter opens up some avenues for future research. First, in the skilling of staff for co-production, we still need empirical understanding concerning the perspectives of staff: what are the trickiest parts of co-production, what types of co-production take staff furthest out of their comfort zones and why? Here, surveys across different professional fields and levels could bring particularly illuminating insights. Second, the different types of skills presented here as segmenting, communication and enabling skills could be examined and developed further through empirical studies in different task environments, as a way to develop the categorisation of the core co-production skills for public service personnel. Questions arising here

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include: how are these co-production skills handled in the formal education of students in various fields of public services? And, do personal attributes make a difference in mastering certain skills more than others, and if so, how can new types of boundary-breaking teams be built up in public service organisations (cf. the study of Lifshitz-Assaf 2018)? Third, in relation to the motivation of staff, the idea of identity work could be studied further in different types of co-production tasks, across different occupations, to understand the transformation which co-production brings about to staff in their work.

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CHAPTER 26

Citizens’ Motivations for Co-production: Willingness, Ability and Opportunity at Play Trui Steen

Introduction: The Need to Understand Citizens’ Motivation for Co-production Co-production profoundly changes the relation between government and citizens, challenging their relative power positions. As a result, increasingly it is questioned what co-production implies for the realisation of public values, not only in terms of changing relationships, but also concerning the efficiency and quality of services provided, and the democratic quality of service delivery (e.g. Jaspers and Steen 2019). Public and non-profit actors rely on citizens-users’ input to provide better services as they are making use of citizens’ time, knowledge and expertise to help increase efficiency of service delivery or enhance responsiveness of the services to the users’ needs. Moreover, many public services simply cannot be produced without users’ input, thus depending on citizens’ willingness to co-produce. A typical example: without students doing their part, no learning takes place. Pestoff (2018, 31) refers to public service users as passive beneficiaries of services, consumers with some choice but little voice, active co-producers or even service providers who are fully responsible for their own service provision. This typology shows the need to reflect on the rights and responsibilities of citizens co-producers, and thus to consider not only co-production’s impact on the quality and efficiency of services but also on the democratic quality of T. Steen (B) KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_26

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service provision. The latter implies public values such as citizen empowerment, inclusion, equity and equal access to service delivery. This especially directs attention to the question of who engages in co-production initiatives and, as such, to the concern that in co-production the input of certain service users might be limited or benefits might be unevenly distributed (Verschuere et al. 2018, 245). Moreover, recent research indicates potential conflicts in values and opposing interests of different stakeholders engaging in co-production (Meijer 2016; Jaspers and Steen 2019; Scolobig in this volume). The concerns about empowerment, inclusion and equity that co-production provokes, confirm that simply providing the possibility for citizens-users to co-produce may not suffice (see also Meijer 2016, 606; Vanleene et al. 2017, 116). In order to overcome inequalities based on some citizens being less able or willing to co-produce than others, government strategies are needed that help to increase the ease for citizens to co-produce, and provide incentives to (specific groups of) citizens. To do so, however, it is important to understand better citizens’ motivations, abilities and opportunities for co-production.

Citizens’ Motivations to Co-produce Self-Interest and Community-Interest Studies of citizens’ motivations for co-production often refer to Alford’s (2002) theoretical discussion and case study analysis of what induces clients to contribute their time and effort to the co-production of public services. Alford mentions material incentives , which include tangible benefits such as money, goods or services. Solidary (also called sociality or social ) incentives are rewards that come from associating with others, such as sense of group membership, being well regarded or enjoying working together with others. Expressive or normative incentives are intangible rewards that relate to purposive norms and commitments about moral and social issues, and that attach merit to public value or distributive justice. These also include civic duty and sense of ownership, or a feeling of being responsible for the well-being of others, which induce willingness to help improve services (Voorberg et al. 2015). Additionally, rewards related to normative incentives may include the sense of satisfaction of contributing to a worthwhile cause or of doing something for the community: a so-called ‘impure altruism’ or the ‘warm glow’ arising from the act of helping (cf. Andreoni 1990; Steen 2006). Finally, intrinsic rewards denote the sense of self-determination and competence one derives from doing something. Through this typology, which distinguishes between self-interest on the one hand and motivations that go beyond the private value a co-producer derives from co-production on the other hand, Alford steps away from the dominant economic approach in Public Administration of the 1980s and 1990s that looked at individuals as mere utility maximisers (cf. van Eijk and Gasco 2018, 67). He reasons that, in particular, collective forms of co-production

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in which all members of the community share benefits regardless of their contribution, may be expected to be prompted less by material rewards, and more by solidary rewards (Alford 2002, 35, based on Sharp 1978). This is supported by Voorberg et al. (2018) who, through an experiment, demonstrate that willingness to co-produce can be enhanced by financial incentives only to a limited degree. Likewise, in a survey experiment Letki and Steen (2020) find that monetary rewards do not affect the decision to co-produce, with the exception of such rewards crowding-in co-production under high levels of unemployment. Similarly, Blakeley and Evans (2009) and van Eijk and Steen (2014, 2016) find both self-centred motivations and altruistic explanations for citizens’ engagement. Self-interest may include direct benefits derived from a public service being co-produced, e.g. the tangible benefits identified by Alford (2002) such as money, goods or services. However, other nonmaterial benefits can also be derived from co-producing, such as acquiring new competences, gaining self-confidence, learning to know people through the co-production process or even finding a solution against boredom. Altruistic explanations imply a willingness to take up one’s responsibilities in the public domain, or may include reciprocity, i.e. the desire of persons to be able to give something back when receiving help. Alford (2002) studies ‘clients’ which implies that as service users they receive private value from the service provided. He contrasts ‘clients’ with ‘volunteers’ who provide input, without necessarily individually consuming the services concerned, and with ‘citizens’ who as part of a collective hold a distinct relationship both with fellow citizens and with government, and who receive public rather than private value. Alford finds these distinctions of importance as ‘each category has a different set of stakes in its relationship with government organizations, and consequently the factors that influence them to co-produce may be different’ (Alford 2002, 34). Not surprisingly, he finds that the more co-production provides public rather than private value for co-producers, the more complex are the motivations to co-produce. Yet the distinction is an artificial one since individuals often at the same time are consumers, volunteers and citizens, and as such the motivation of individuals to co-produce can link at the same time to the private value they receive as a service user, the intangible reward of impure altruism perceived through volunteering, and the public value perceived as a citizen who feels part of a bigger collective. Also, participation may over time move from a narrow focus on one’s self-interest to an increased concern for the community (Blakeley and Evans 2009). Moreover, the interests of the individual co-producer and the collective interest are not necessarily in contrast (Brandsen and Helderman 2012). Empirical research indicates that individual co-producers may be motivated by different factors simultaneously (e.g. Fledderus and Honingh 2016, 81), but also within one co-production initiative co-producers may be differently motivated. This is illustrated by a study of client councils in elderly care organisations by van Eijk and Steen (2014) who explicitly focus on identifying different viewpoints, each reflecting distinct motivations that exist

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for co-producing among persons engaged in one particular co-production initiative. Salience and Demand-Driven Co-production According to Pestoff (2012, 1110) the motivation of citizens to co-produce depends on the salience of the service provided. Salience concerns the sense of a co-production project being needed, as the service provided affects coproducers themselves, their family or loved-ones; but may also refer to the perception of citizens as to whether a serious problem is being tackled (Bovaird et al. 2016, 53). Letki and Steen (2020), for example, find that utility— whether one uses the service—increases willingness to co-produce. Van Eijk and Steen (2016) further distinguish between ‘personal salience’ or an individual’s perception of how a service affects him/herself, family or friends, and ‘social salience’ or the importance of the service to one’s neighbourhood or community. Only when a service is perceived as salient, will citizens consider active engagement by weighting up the investment of time and effort against the increased availability of services through co-production. This implies that citizens’ participation in co-production is demand-driven, calling upon those who are unsatisfied (Vanleene et al. 2017, 117). Co-production, then, is answering an unfulfilled need of citizens because government either fails to deliver services, citizens assess the services provided as being of low quality, or services lack responsiveness to the needs of (specific groups in) the community (Thijssen and van Dooren 2016, 92). This idea is supported by international survey data demonstrating that when people feel services to be poor, engagement in co-production is more likely (Parrado et al. 2013). Van Eijk and Steen (2016), indeed, find that feelings of anxiety and dissatisfaction raise engagement in Neighbourhood Watches. However, they do not find such problem-driven motivation in other cases studied, including citizens co-producing in advisory councils at primary schools or in health care facilities.

Ability Socio-Demographic Background As well as citizens’ motivations, their capabilities and resources to co-produce are also found to be important factors explaining citizens’ engagement in coproduction. Bovaird et al. (2015) point out the linkage between the monetised economy and civic society, as the monetised economy provides people jobs, income, skills, etc., and thus increases their ability to engage in social activities, including also co-production. While human capital (such as income, education or professional position) is presumed to play an important role in co-production (van Eijk and Steen 2014), at present there is still very little insight into the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of coproducers, since research results seem inconclusive. Parrado et al. (2013) find

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higher involvement in co-production by women and older citizens. Distinguishing between types of co-production, Bovaird et al. (2015) find that women are more involved in individual co-production than men, while no gender differences are found as to engagement in collective forms of coproduction. Studying participation in a programme where citizens can report problems in the public domain, Thijssen and van Dooren (2016) find higher participation among men and middle-aged, but also among persons living in a family with children, holding a non-immigrant background and having lived for a longer time in the city. A survey studying different types of coproduction activities in England and Wales (Bovaird et al. 2016), in contrast, finds no strong patterns linking co-production and individual characteristics, from which they conclude that ‘the whole population is potentially relevant for co-production activities’, but also that as a result ‘little guidance can be given on how to target promotion campaigns to attract more co-producers’ (Bovaird et al. 2016, 64). Internal Efficacy, External Efficacy and Selection Biases Citizens put in time and effort in co-production, and persons may thus refrain from co-producing when time is lacking or when, for example, poor health condition restricts the effort they can make. Co-production projects may also require citizens to have specific knowledge and skills. Voorberg et al. (2015, 45) point at competences such as being aware of community needs and being able to articulate one’s own needs, which relate to the demand-side of coproduction. Van Eijk and Steen (2014) identify a wide variety of competencies that may be valuable in co-production, including knowledge about the service at hand (e.g. having expertise in the field, having a clear understanding of and being able to process substantive information about the public service concerned), specific skills to handle co-production tasks (e.g. organising meetings, …), social skills (e.g. finding it easy to mingle with other people), holding ethical values (e.g. being fair, open and honest) or having a strong personality (e.g. being persistent). Yet their empirical data provide mixed results in terms of the importance co-producers attach to having such competences (van Eijk and Steen 2014, 2016; van Eijk et al. 2017). Certain (groups of) citizens may hold back from participating when they feel they do not have the necessary competencies to co-produce. The latter have been named ‘subjective civic skills’ (Denters and Klok 2010) or also ‘internal efficacy’ (van Eijk and Steen 2014): citizens’ perceptions about their own competences to understand and engage effectively. A person’s internal efficacy influences perceived control over one’s life, while high perceived control, in its turn, increases the chance of a person selecting challenging tasks, and (thus) of participation (Fledderus and Honingh 2016). Internal efficacy can be distinguished from external efficacy, the latter indicating citizens’ perceptions about the usefulness of investing the necessary efforts in co-production (van Eijk and Steen 2014). This perception is based

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on citizens’ trust in government actors to deliver services and to provide genuine opportunities for them to meaningfully engage. External efficacy as such includes citizens’ perception of public performance, as well as their perception of how well government is involving citizens (Bovaird et al. 2016, 54), which both are influenced by previous experiences. The assumption that citizens will more easily co-produce when they find the outcome preferable, trust their goals will be reached and perceive that they can make a difference is supported by quantitative research (Parrado et al. 2013; Bovaird et al. 2016) which finds a strong correlation between having a strong sense that people can make a difference and engagement in co-production. The importance of self-efficacy, which combines both internal and external efficacy, suggests that citizen co-production can be increased by government making an effort to convince people that they can make a difference, and by ensuring that coproduction projects are genuinely effective rather than carried out as symbolic actions (Bovaird et al. 2016, 63–64). The role of efficacy, however, also raises concern about equity effects of co-production. Low (internal) efficacy or low perceived control may lead to self-selection, holding persons back from participating. Lacking capacity, both ‘hard’ characteristics such as education or work experience, and ‘soft’ characteristics such as social skills or appearance, may additionally result in selection biases from the part of government. Fledderus and Honingh (2016), in their study of re-activating unemployed people, find that co-production activities that require effort from users might suffer from ‘creaming’: those with better ‘qualifications’ are invited or selected to participate, since government actors expect this to lead to higher success rates. However, Thijssen and van Dooren (2016, 104–105) find that even in low-effort co-production projects, where little effort or resources are needed to co-produce, socio-demographic biases (e.g. differences in engagement related to age, education or ethnicity) exist. They call attention to the possibility of the Matthew effect—which can be summarised as ‘the rich get richter, the poor get poorer’—occurring if coproduction is supply-driven rather than demand-driven. This means that, if co-production is set-up as an answer to service delivery failure, it will provide access to services for citizens that previously were lacking (good quality) services. If, in contrast, co-production is driven by the availability of citizens that are willing and capable of co-producing and ‘if mainly privileged people and neighbourhoods engage in co-production, it may well be that those who need services the least, get the most [providing] an accumulated advantage of reward and recognition for those who already are in a strong position’ (Thijssen and van Dooren 2016, 93). The latter underscores the importance of developing specific techniques for engaging vulnerable citizens and to lower thresholds for their participation (see: Brandsen, in this volume).

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Social Capital and the Neighbourhood in Which One Lives Co-production, however, not only changes the relationship between government and citizens, but also affects relations between citizens. Thus not only citizens’ trust in government is key, but also trust in fellow citizens’ integrity, competences and intentions to co-produce for the collective good (Fledderus and Honingh 2016; Meijer 2016, 604). As such, the issue of social capital comes to the foreground. Social capital refers to social connectedness, including the environment one lives in and the networks engaged in. Such networks can be a constraining factor on citizens’ engagement in co-production, since restrictions on time available force people to balance work, family and social engagements. However, the opposite effect may also take place. Engagement in social networks may actually support co-production since social contacts expose a person to new opportunities for engaging in collaborative projects (Steen 2006; van Eijk and Steen 2014) and ‘being asked is an important incentive to take part’ (van Eijk and Steen 2016, 40). Thijssen and van Dooren (2016) indeed find that participation is ‘infectious’: in neighbourhoods with a higher number of neighbourhood initiatives, they find that more citizens take part in co-production. Clark and Brudney (s.d.) detect a ‘learning’ effect, as living near highly active co-producers increases one’s likelihood to co-produce. Fledderus et al. (2014) point out that high intra-group trust may bond within groups, but may also limit ‘bridging’, i.e. may sharpen boundaries with other groups and thus may bring the risk that people outside of the group are distrusted, constraining engagement in other networks. The issue of social capital highlights not only the importance of individuals’ capacity to co-produce, but also shows that co-production is ‘a highly contextual activity’ (Thijssen and van Dooren 2016, 89), determined not only by who one is, but also by the environment one lives in. Socio-economic neighbourhood composition (e.g. population distribution in terms of age or education, proportion of working-class and middle-class) as well as physical morphology of a neighbourhood (e.g. the extent to which functions such as working, residing and leisure are spatially closely knit or separated) may be more or less conductive to social cohesion, which in turn impacts on co-production. Letki and Steen (2020) show that the relevance of individual determinants of co-production decisions—including utility (or salience) of the service, monetary and reputational rewards, and users’ compliance to social norms (other known persons co-producing)—depends on the context. In a large-scale cross-national survey experiment, they find that attachment to the local community and trust in local authorities, as well as the socioeconomic characteristics of the respondent’s area—ethnic diversity, level of unemployment and population size—are significant determinants of willingness to co-produce. Moreover, these contextual factors moderate the effect of individual determinants. In their experiment, utility, social norms and rewards are shown to be largely irrelevant under a favourable context; yet utility and social norms become important ‘tools’ that can be used to crowd in co-production under unfavourable socio-psychological conditions.

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Governments Providing a Context that Supports Co-production The above discussion indicates that the environment one lives in impacts co-production. This in turn implies that government can seek to provide a context that conditions co-production not only directly, through its interaction with citizens, but also indirectly through urban planning and building the spatial and social structure of neighbourhoods. This takes us to a third issue to be discussed: contextual opportunities for co-production supported by government. Ease of Involvement and Professional Support Pestoff (2012, 1110) defines not only salience, but also ‘ease of involvement’ as a crucial factor to understand why citizens become active participants in the production of public services. He explains the ease of involvement as depending on several factors, such as the distance to the service provider or the information available to citizens about the service and its provision. These factors influence the ‘costs’ that citizens experience, in terms of time and effort required, which Pestoff calls the transaction costs of co-production. Vanleene et al. (2017) relate ease of involvement in co-production to the professional support that government actors provide, as this can lower the transaction costs of citizens. Government can actively support citizens by providing information, through frontline workers offering aid, training or tools to citizens, or by actively mobilising citizens to participate ‘and not simply by providing the option without any further action on their part’ (Vanleene et al. 2017, 116). Additionally, public servants can simplify co-production tasks, for example making it easier for citizens by structuring choices (Moynihan and Thomas 2013). Fostering ability thus can include enhancing the co-producers’ own capacities for co-producing and building trust, as well as making the co-production task easier (Alford 2002, 50–51). Finding that different perspectives exist among co-producers in relation to their engagement, van Eijk and Steen (2014) suggest that government should emphasise different motivational incentives in its communication to and interaction with (potential) co-producers. Yet empirical findings differ as to the extent that government initiatives can positively affect citizens’ co-production. Jakobsen (2013) points at the possibility to support capacity building among disadvantaged groups. Through a field experiment, he shows that providing knowledge and tools can increase participation, especially on the part of citizens with the greatest need for the service. In the Global South, where co-production is seen as an alternative solution to failed service delivery, citizens hold limited capacity to demand quality services (Wenene et al. 2016). Mangai (2017) demonstrates how in such contexts, citizens’ engagement remains dormant if citizens are not effectively mobilised by professionals and asked to participate. In another field experiment, however,

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Thomsen and Jakobsen (2015) find that simply sending information material, such as booklets or leaflets, is not sufficient to increase co-production. Likewise, Bovaird et al. (2016, 61–63) find little effect of information-based nudges on co-production efforts. Compulsion Alford (2002, 49–50) points at the potential for government to use sanctions as a means to generate users’ co-production. Since there is a difference between being able to apply a sanction and actually applying it, the possibility that government might apply sanctions may itself persuade calculating persons that it is best to act cooperatively in order to avoid sanctions. Also, sanctions can function as a guarantee to co-producers that the process to which they are contributing is fair, since others are required to contribute likewise. As such, they can provide incentives for both ‘“conditional cooperators”, who are willing to initiate or join collective action when they estimate that others will reciprocate and who will continue such actions as long as others demonstrate similar behaviour … [and] “willing punishers” … [who] rely more heavily on social control and punishment’ (Pestoff 2012, 1112, based on Ostrom 2000). However, Alford (2002, 42–43) also finds that sanctions risk discouraging co-production by demoralising, crowding-out intrinsic motivation and cooperative behaviour and provoking perverse or opportunistic behaviour, for example, long-term jobless persons complying with the letter of a project by signing work test forms rather than engaging in active job search. Further, there is a danger that governments simply lack resources for sustained monitoring. In their case study of a re-activation programme for long-term unemployed, Fledderus and Honingh (2016) did not find evidence of such crowding-out effects, yet neither did they find empirical support for their assumption that compulsion or threatening with sanctions can counteract self-selection patterns by helping to reach persons with low motivation, low trust or low perceived control. Rather than calling for sanctions, Moynihan and Thomas (2013) suggest that an ‘appeal to people’s sense of what is “right” can serve as an efficient way to encourage co-production’. Digital Enabled Co-production and Citizens’ Ability to Co-produce Technological changes, developments in information and communication technologies especially, are another means to facilitate citizen co-production since they provide new ways in which citizens may contribute to service delivery, e.g. through the collection and sharing of information (Rodriguez Müller and Steen 2019). Examples include the use of social media, apps on mobile devices or the internet to generate transportation maps and influence public mobility policies, to provide local government with data on where services such as fixing potholes are needed or to enable elderly to live independently at home (cf. Lember 2018).

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Social media are important in simplifying co-production tasks. Additionally, they can play a role in appealing to social norms for spurring co-production, influencing not only the users who receive messages but also other persons in their social media network (Moynihan and Thomas 2013, 792). Yet with the increased use of ICT tools in co-production come new risks, such as citizens becoming passive or even unaware co-producers (Lember 2018; Lember et al. 2019). Technological advances can positively affect citizens’ ability to coproduce, but also risk exacerbating existing inequalities. Technology can make co-production so easy that it encourages a small group of citizens to over-use the system, for example by registering very frequent requests. If such highvolume users or ‘frequent flyers’ are not representative of their communities, this may be cause for concern (Clark and Brudney s.d.). At the same time, the ‘digital divide’ implies that certain groups, such as the elderly, persons with low-income, or minorities, may have less experience or fewer resources to use new information technologies, making it more difficult for them to get involved in digital-enabled co-production initiatives (Clark et al. 2013). Research on citizens’ reporting to non-emergency municipal call centres, finds that ethnic groups may be left behind when a service expands from the basic call centre to the internet, but also that smartphone applications may have the potential to bridge the digital divide (Clark et al. 2013). In a similar coproduction case, high-volume users are found to be generally representative of the overall community and that, in those instances where particular groups were more likely to be high-volume users, historically disadvantaged groups rather than traditionally privileged groups tended to be overrepresented (Clark and Brudney s.d.). However, another study on citizens reporting in a smart bike-sharing setting found that most users reported service-related issues via traditional channels (front office and the phone), while much less use was made of e-government channels (website and emails) or new digital channels (the mobile app). The migration from traditional to new digital channels thus seems far from being automatic (Rodriguez Müller et al. s.d.).

State of Art and Challenges in Studying Citizens’ Engagement in Co-production Looking Beyond Disciplinary Borders Whereas the dominant focus in co-production research has long been on collaborative processes and networks, and on the organisations involved therein, our discussion above displays that increasingly researchers have directed attention to understanding citizens’ willingness and ability to participate in co-production. Theory building on citizens’ engagement in coproduction has looked beyond disciplinary borders, borrowing and adapting insights from other fields of research. Among others we find insights on community-oriented motivations being derived from studies on volunteering (e.g. Clary et al. 1998; Reed and Selbee 2003; Benjamin and Brudney 2018),

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while private sector customer engagement literature provided insights on the inbuilt role of service users as co-producers (e.g. Vargo and Lusch 2008; Van Doorn et al. 2010). Deliberative democracy and political participation research put forward issues such as citizens’ self-assessments of being competent to participate in politics, citizens’ trust in government or individual characteristics affecting political participation (e.g. Craig et al. 1990; Brady et al. 1995; Amnå 2010)—in its turn inspired by socio-psychological theory on perceived control and people’s self-efficacy (e.g. Gist and Mitchell 1992; Skinner 1995; Bandura 2001). Social capital theory (e.g. Putnam 2001; Graddy and Wang 2009) has been used to apprehend how social connections that individuals have and social networks within communities impact on civic engagement. These insights have further been combined with studies of urbanisation (e.g. Jacobs 1961; Sampson 2012) to discuss how spatial structures influence community features such as social control, trust and social capital building. Inspiration has been found also in research linking public service motivation with engagement in meaningful civic action (e.g. Brewer 2003; Houston 2006; Pandey et al. 2008), social psychology and sociological research pointing at reciprocity and applied specifically in literature on non-take up of (public) services (e.g. Gouldner 1960; Cohen 1999; Reijnders et al. 2018), or even literature on regulation and (interactive) compliance informing about the compulsory side of co-production (Klepper and Nagin 1989; Sparrow 1994), while nudge theory (e.g. John et al. 2011) inspired research into behavioural change, looking at the impact of nudges on engagement in co-production. Furthermore, as empirical studies of citizens’ co-production relate to specific policy fields, they are often influenced by literature on the particular policy field or service at hand such as health care sciences, educational sciences, literature on community policing or urban studies. Many challenges persist, however, to further connect different fields of study, such as overcoming separate vocabularies that are adhered to in different disciplines (Steen et al. 2019). Empirical Evidence Building on Different Motivations at Play in Different Policy Domains Looking across disciplinary boundaries is beneficial since ‘relying only on public administration paradigms and theories will not be sufficient to understand the potential and challenges of co-production’ (Steen et al. 2019, 70). Yet, while valuable insights can and are derived from other disciplines, further theory building and empirical evidence gathering on motivations for co-producing specifically are needed. As Benjamin and Brudney (2018, 52) state, concerning the use of insights from research on volunteering to better understand citizen co-production: ‘we should not expect these motivations [for co-producing] to be identical to those of volunteers’ (Benjamin and Brudney 2018, 52). Likewise, the context of consumer engagement or political participation might be very distinct from that of co-production, and a multidisciplinary approach thus will be helpful only when tested in a specific

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co-production context (van Eijk and Gasco 2018, 69). It is thus not only of interest to see what disciplinary borders have been crossed in theory building, but also what empirical evidence has been collected. Examples of empirical studies on citizens’ motivations and capacities for participating in co-production include, among others, research on local community development projects and urban governance (e.g. Blakeley and Evans 2009; Denters and Klok 2010; Vanleene et al. 2017), health and social care (Pestoff 2012; van Eijk and Steen 2014; Bovaird et al. 2016; Meijer 2016), community safety (Meijer 2014, 2016; Bovaird et al. 2016; van Eijk and Steen 2016; van Eijk et al. 2017), education (Thomsen and Jakobsen 2015), re-activation programmes for long-term unemployed (Alford 2002; Fledderus and Honingh 2016), immigration and integration (Jakobsen 2013; Voorberg et al. 2018), contributions to maintenance and security by social housing tenants (Alford 2002; Brandsen and Helderman 2012), participatory budgeting (Barbera et al. 2016), citizens’ reporting problems in the public domain (Clark et al. 2013; Thijssen and van Dooren 2016) or even more trivial tasks such as co-producing postal services by writing postcodes in particular locations on envelopes, or taxpayers submitting tax returns (Alford 2002). The broad range of studies seeking to understand citizens’ motivations to participate in co-production, has almost made this issue a separate research line within co-production studies. That despite this, we know little still about who engages in co-production and why, in fact, might not be that surprising, as it seems naive to talk about co-producers without distinguishing between different types of co-production. The empirical evidence available on citizens’ engagement in co-production has been built mainly through case studies (e.g. Alford 2002; Pestoff 2012; Vanleene et al. 2017), occasional survey or field experiments that aim to make stronger causal claims (e.g. Jakobsen 2013; Thomsen and Jakobsen 2015; Voorberg et al. 2018; Letki and Steen 2020), semi-quantitative research such as through Q-method analyses (e.g. van Eijk and Steen 2014; van Eijk et al. 2017; Barbera et al. 2016), and to a lesser extent, quantitative data analysis (e.g. Denters and Klok 2010; Parrado et al. 2013; Bovaird et al. 2016). Relying primarily on studies of specific types of co-production, this depicts a major challenge for generalisability of findings and consequently for gaining broader insight into citizens’ engagement in co-production. More comparative research, hence, is needed to gain further insight into potential differences in citizens’ willingness, ability and opportunity for coproduction across different types of co-production. As co-production projects’ features may differ across different forms of co-production, the type of motivation to tap on most effectively will differ across types of co-production (Alford 2002, 47). Bovaird et al. (2016) find that not only citizens are more likely to engage in co-production activities that are relatively easy and can be carried out individually, but also that different factors can help explain citizens’ engagement in individual versus collective co-production. Social capital, for example, may be expected to impact especially on—and vice versa to

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be impacted by—collective co-production initiatives (Bovaird et al. 2016). Pestoff (2012) distinguishes between enduring and non-enduring services. The durability of an enduring service, such as care of people with disabilities, implies that service users are locked into them for a longer time (Verschuere et al. 2012), affecting the impact and salience of the service for its users, and thus also their interest in co-producing. Also citizens’ characteristics may play out differently in different types of co-production, explaining inconsistent findings on socio-demographic characteristics, personal resources and engagement in co-production. Since different co-production projects require different competences of the citizens, an individual’s self-confidence to provide care for a neighbour or family member may differ from the same person’s self-awareness of his/her capacities to participate in a collaborative project to re-organise urban mobility. If government aims to build incentives, these should thus be ‘customised’ to different groups and different co-production initiatives, taking into account distinct motivations and abilities, as well as the specific context wherein co-production takes place (Brandsen et al. 2018; van Eijk and Gasco 2018). Drop Out and Non-participation The issue of endurance of co-production also poses the question what differentiates motivation of people whose involvement sustains over time from that of ‘non-stayers’ (Blakeley and Evans 2009), and thus points at the need for future research to look into reasons for terminating one’s contribution to co-producing public services. In a case study of citizens’ engagement in an urban regeneration project, for example, Blakeley and Evans (2009) find citizens who are motivated by the gratitude they receive for their work, while others complain that participation is lonely and unrewarding. Also they find both co-producers who admit boredom to be a motive for their activity or simply continued out of pure habit, while others suffer burn-out; demonstrating the differences in risk of drop out among co-producers. In the same case, they find activists who see (small) successes which help to build their determination to continue their work, whereas others sustain their involvement for the opposite reason: persistent concerns that remain unresolved. Others became disillusioned and considered dropping out or, again the opposite, some dropped out because the issue they were concerned about had been successfully addressed. Success as well as unsuccessful outcomes can thus either sustain or terminate involvement. As well as individual factors playing a role, government actions also risk demoralising co-producers, for example if government policy is frequently changing or if through centralisation government is taking over services that citizens earlier perceived as their own (Pestoff 2012, 1110, based on Ostrom 1996). Likewise, only a few studies include information about non-participants. Denters and Klok (2010) study former residents of a devastated inner-city district to find out what distinguishes individuals who actively engage in the

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district’s reconstruction planning from those who don’t participate. They find major determinants of participation to be salience or personal interest in the redevelopment process (for example, because of having lived in the inner circle of the area concerned), mobilisation (being provided with the opportunity to participate and being aware of the options available) and, albeit to a lesser extent, internal self-efficacy. Blakeley and Evans (2009), in turn, link nonparticipation with personal and social alienation, low self-efficacy and lack of time because of family or work commitments. Fledderus and Honingh (2016) studied a selected group of non-participants who applied for involvement in a work corporation’s personal re-employment programme but did not start working there. They find both organisational selection and personal selection at play. For example, the work corporation noted they had no place available at the time, or potential participants lacked trust that they would get a job anyway or said they could not combine participation with family responsibilities. This limited set of studies provides input for developing hypotheses on self-selection versus organisational mobilisation and selection as explanations for (non-)participation, to be tested in future research.

Conclusion Factors related to motivation, ability, context and opportunity have been identified in our search to explain citizens’ engagement in co-production. Having pointed out a number of avenues for future research, a final challenge lies in gaining further insight into the interplay between these factors. We need to look at and manage the conditions for co-production as “a ‘package’ rather than as entirely separate variables” (Bovaird et al. 2016, 64). As both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators are expected to play a role in co-production, it is important to know if extrinsic motivators might crowd out intrinsic motivation, but also if co-producers’ (perceptions of their) capacity impact on—or are impacted by—their motivation. Moreover, our discussion showed that we cannot separate citizens’ willingness and capacity to participate in coproduction projects from the environment one lives in, nor from the efforts made by government to engage citizens, and thus the attitude of politicians and public professionals towards citizens’ involvement (Ryan 2012; Tuurnas 2015; van Eijk et al. 2019) and the role they take in shaping the context for co-production (Brandsen and Honingh 2013; Moynihan and Thomas 2013; Parrado et al. 2013; Steen and Tuurnas 2018). Indeed, this last remark highlights that ultimately, co-production is all about the interaction between public service professionals and citizens.

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Steen, T. (2006). Public sector motivation: Is there something to learn from the study of volunteerism? Public Policy and Administration, 21(1), 49–62. Steen, T.‚ and Tuurnas, S. (2018). The roles of the professional in co-production and co-Creation processes. In Brandsen, T.‚ Steen, T.‚ and Verschuere, B. (eds.)‚ CoProduction and co-creation: Engaging citizens in public services (pp. 80–92). Milton Parks: Routledge. Steen, T., Brandsen, T., and Verschuere, B. (2019). Public administration into the wild: Grappling with co-production and social innovation. In Massey, A. (ed.), A research agenda for public administration (pp. 63–78). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Tuurnas, S. (2015). Learning to co-produce? The perspective of public service professionals. International Journal of Public Sector Management, 28(7)‚ 583–598. Thijssen, P., and van Dooren, W. (2016). Who you are/where you live: Do neighbourhood characteristics explain co-production? International Review of Administrative Sciences, 82(1), 88–109. Thomsen, M., and Jakobsen, M. (2015). Influencing citizen co-production by sending encouragement and advice: A field experiment. International Public Management Journal, 18(2), 286–303. Van Doorn, J., Lemon, K., Mittal, V., Nass, S., Pick, D., Pirner, P., and Verhoef, P. (2010). Customer engagement behavior: Theoretical foundations and research directions. Journal of Service Research, 13(3), 253–266. van Eijk, C., and Gasco, M. (2018). Unravelling the co-producers: Who are they and what motivations do they have? In Brandsen, T., Steen, T., and Verschuere, B. (eds.), Co-production and co-creation: Engaging citizens in public services (pp. 63– 76). Milton Park: Routledge. van Eijk, C.J.A., and Steen, T. (2014). Why people co-produce: Analysing citizens’ perceptions on co-planning engagement in health care services. Public Management Review, 16(3), 358–382. van Eijk, C.J.A., and Steen, T. (2016). Why engage in co-production of public services? Mixing theory and empirical evidence. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 82(1), 28–46. van Eijk, C., Steen, T., and Torenvlied, R. (2019). Public professionals’ engagement in co-production: The impact of the work environment on elderly care managers’ perceptions on collaboration with client councils. American Review of Public Administration, 49(6), 733–748. Van Eijk, C., Steen, T., and Verschuere, B. (2017). Co-producing safety in the local community: A Q-methodology study on the incentives of Belgian and Dutch members of neighbourhood watch schemes. Local Government Studies, 43(3), 323–343. Vanleene, D., Verschuere, B., & Voets, J. (2017). Co-producing a nicer neighbourhood: Why do people participate in community development projects? Lex Localis, 15(1), 111–132. Vargo, S., and Lusch, R. (2008). Service-dominant logic: Continuing the evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), 1–10. Verschuere, B., Brandsen, T., and Pestoff, V. (2012). Co-production: The state of the art in research and the future agenda. Voluntas, 20(1), 1–19. Verschuere, B., Vanleene, D., Steen, T., and Brandsen, T. (2018). Democratic coproduction: Concepts and determinants. In Brandsen, T., Steen, T., and Verschuere, B. (eds.), Co-production and co-creation: Engaging citizens in public services (pp. 243–251). Milton Park: Routledge.

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Voorberg, W., Bekkers, V., and Tummers, L. (2015). A systemic review of co-creation and co-production: Embarking on the social innovation journey. Public Management Review, 17(9), 1333–1357. Voorberg, W., Jilke, S., Tummers, L., and Bekkers, V. (2018). Financial rewards do not stimulate coproduction: Evidence from two experiments. Public Administration Review, 78(6), 864–873. Wenene, T., Steen, T., and Rutgers, M. (2016). Civil servants’ perspectives on the role of citizens in public service delivery in Uganda. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 82(1), 169–189.

CHAPTER 27

Vulnerable Citizens: Will Co-production Make a Difference? Taco Brandsen

Introduction One of the presumed benefits of introducing co-production is that it will lead to a greater inclusion of citizens. As Verschuere et al. (2018, 244) have noted, ‘It is (…) important, and a matter of legitimacy, that those who are affected by co-produced services or by participatory decision-making are also included in the process, and have an actual influence on the outcome’. Inclusion can have several different meanings. For one thing, it may imply deepening involvement by those who are already participating, for instance, by allowing them more influence to shape their own services. It can also be understood as broadening involvement, by including citizens who previously did not participate actively. The latter interpretation will be central to the analysis in this chapter. Theoretically, co-production could be used to penetrate the nooks and crannies that traditional democratic institutions cannot reach. What I will try to assess is how realistic this prospect is. Governments have tried to involve their citizens in decision-making for decades, with a great variety of approaches (Fung 2006). However, such processes have a consistent bias: some segments of the population tend to be underrepresented, while those who were already well-represented in traditional democratic institutions also tend to capture new avenues for participation. Vulnerable and marginalised people are particularly at risk of being underrepresented. T. Brandsen (B) Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_27

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When I speak of participation in a public service context, this refers to a wide range of phenomena. Participation can take place at several stages of the policy cycle, from public consultations at a late stage of the policy process to the early, close involvement of citizens in designing policies (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012). This does not make a comparative analysis of its effectiveness particularly easy. The term ‘co-production’, though ostensibly more restrictive, is in practice frequently used to refer to consultation processes that are not so very different from what has been tried for decades. One reason for this is that local and national governments differ widely in how open they are to participation. What is revolutionary in one place (say, a local government organising public consultations) but old hat in another; yet the term ‘co-production’ (or, more recently, ‘co-creation’) will be used to signify all that is considered new and exciting in its context. It is the dubious joy of a concept coming into fashion: everyone will want to claim it for their own, inevitably muddying its distinctiveness. However, co-production can be about more than re-branding existing practices: in the sense defined in this chapter, it is an essentially different type of approach. It will be defined as a relationship between a paid employee of an organisation and (groups of) individual citizens that requires a direct and active contribution from these citizens to the work of the organisation (Brandsen and Honingh 2016). Please note that there are many other excellent definitions and typologies out there (see, for example, Pestoff 2012; Bovaird and Loeffler 2013; Nabatchi et al. 2017) and that many of the points raised in this chapter apply to co-production in all of its different senses and meanings. There is an important admission to make from the start: empirically, we still know fairly little about how co-production actually affects the participation of vulnerable people, aside from scattered case material (Kjellström et al. 2019). Only a few studies on co-production have focused on this issue specifically (e.g. Jakobsen and Andersen 2013) or compared its effects on different types of people. But we do have a good understanding of how traditional types of participation function in practice and how they affect vulnerable people, which means we can theoretically extrapolate these findings and estimate whether the same dynamics are likely to affect co-production. The first step will be to discuss what vulnerability means. The next is to analyse how it can affect people’s ability and willingness to participate, based on earlier studies. I will discuss why they are underrepresented and assess whether co-production is likely to change their position. The final step is to consider whether new types of participation such as co-production can realistically be expected to make a difference. The conclusion will be mixed: there are reasons why co-production may make a difference, since there are some respects in which it differs fundamentally from more traditional types of participation. However, there are also reasons why it may replicate past biases. To come to firmer conclusions, we will need to collect more evidence on what is actually happening, rather than rely on presumptions.

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What Is Vulnerability? Vulnerability, like co-production, can have various theoretical meanings, depending on the disciplinary perspective from which it is defined. The understanding of vulnerability in this chapter will be primarily informed by a sociological perspective, which links it to the concept of social exclusion. The latter is a broad concept that can (again) have various meanings (Silver 1994), but here will be taken to refer to access to resources and opportunities (for instance, access to institutions or democratic participation) that people are normally expected to possess. In other words, vulnerability is determined by their connection with a social collective. If they lack these resources and opportunities, they are said to be on the margins, or excluded. For instance, they may not be well-integrated in their local community. Inclusion is associated with feelings like trust, attachment and belonging—benefits from which vulnerable people may be excluded. In social policy research, the term ‘social vulnerability’ is used to describe the effects of changing economic, social and welfare conditions on the resilience of individuals and households (Ranci et al. 2014). (Elsewhere, the term ‘social vulnerability’ is often used to describe how people and communities are likely to be affected by natural disasters and environmental hazards related to climate change, and how easily they can recover). Vulnerability then refers to a situation where individuals are not in constant poverty, but constantly at risk of falling into it, because their employment is temporary, because their housing situation is uncertain, because they have to combine work and care, and/or because traditional support structures (family, welfare systems) have weakened. This stress, in turn, may lead to psychological and social problems. Evidence shows that socially vulnerable people are predominantly temporary workers, people with low income hit by chronic disabilities and/or health conditions, women with small children dealing with problems in work/life reconciliation and individuals whose income fluctuates just above and below the poverty line (Ranci et al. 2014). It should be noted that vulnerability is a term heavily inundated with normative and moral flavours (Brown 2011). To speak in terms of vulnerability emphasises the negative, which is why many scholars now consider it more appropriate to approach these issues through the lens of capabilities and resilience. Moreover, while some people are vulnerable by virtually any definition, there are also many whose status is disputed. For instance, someone might be fine psychologically and physically, but become socially vulnerable due to circumstances they cannot control (e.g. mass youth unemployment or a lack of affordable housing). Finally, categorising (a group of) individuals as vulnerable can in itself affect their position, by imposing a (further) stigma and thus strengthening their exclusion, even if the intention was to help. It may put them in the position of passive, weak victims, which is not a label they will necessarily like or identify with. To be clear: in this chapter no normative connotations are intended, although it is admittedly hard to avoid them when discussing a theme of such obvious moral and political sensitivity.

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How Does Vulnerability Affect People’s Ability and Willingness to Participate? To determine whether co-production will make a difference, let me first analyse the conditions that have made traditional participatory approaches so unattractive or difficult for vulnerable people to take part in. The step after that will be to assess whether co-production, which departs from these traditional approaches, can be expected to make a fundamental difference. Participation can have many benefits, for instance, making an organisation more effective (Neshkova and Guo 2011) or making it (seem) more responsive (Halvorsen 2003; Herian et al. 2012). However, attempts to consult citizens have not always been an unequivocal success (Callahan 2007). This was perhaps to be expected: it is far from easy. It is not a question of simply unleashing energy and commitment. However, over time we have learnt more about how it should be organised effectively. As past efforts have been evaluated and new formats have been tested, experience has led organisers to avoid some of the most obvious mistakes (although inevitably, the wheel is often reinvented). Likewise, we have learnt why some people feel less inclined to participate. I will summarise these in terms of five key factors: overdemand, intimidating formats, mismatched expectations, fundamentally different perspectives and a perceived lack of added value. To begin with, there is too much demand on people’s time. In the Western world, the rise of dual breadwinner families and time invested in jobs has meant that people spend less time on other activities. In his famous book on the decline of American civil society, Robert Putnam (2000) noted that volunteering is declining, in part because people spend more of their time doing paid work. Since participation is a type of volunteering, it is also affected by this trend. It should be noted that Putnam’s observations have not been uncontroversial. It has been noted that cross-national patterns of volunteering show a diverse picture that cannot be reduced to a single trend (Dekker and Van den Broek 2006). Others have argued that the effect is not, or not only, a decline in volunteering, as one might expect, but rather a shift in how volunteers are committed, related to wider processes of modernisation (Hustinx and Lammertyn 2003). Concretely, it may involve voluntary work being spread less evenly between people, with some doing more, as others do less. Also, there is a shift towards different types of voluntary work, with more emphasis on short term, perhaps online activities. But whatever view one takes, public consultations are rarely high on bucket lists when people are squeezed for time. Another problem is how participation has traditionally been organised. Often it has mirrored the formal decision-making processes of which it is part, making it feel unfamiliar or even intimidating to certain people, who are then discouraged from participating. This alienation and subordination of outsiders through cultural expressions is what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has called ‘symbolic violence’: a subtle and often unconscious

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method of excluding those who do not possess sufficient ‘cultural capital’. For a start, traditional types of participation are overwhelmingly based on ‘voice’, in Hirschman’s (1970) terms: verbally communicating suggestions for change or grievances, usually in group meetings. This naturally tends to favour those who are good at this kind of communication. Meetings were perhaps structured in a formal style, with an agenda and a specific type of dialogue (Nabatchi 2012). The representatives of public authorities or service providers may be dressed differently from citizens. They may use jargon that is unfamiliar to at least a number of the citizens who are expected to join in. This is no doubt an important reason that highly educated citizens are usually overrepresented in participatory processes. A general problem that plagues participatory processes is that there are radically different expectations about what such a process should deliver. It is quite common to find disappointment on all sides, despite sincere attempts to make it work. Expectations are at the heart of this. A common problem is that citizens expect more influence than they will actually have, because the organisers have not clearly communicated the ‘red lines’. For instance, if citizens come to a consultation assuming that a construction project can still be halted, when in fact it has already been decided on, this can lead to immense frustration, even if the organisers are making an honest attempt to discuss the implementation of the project. On the side of organisational representatives, there may also be misconceptions. They may come into the process looking for consensus, since they are used to dealing with organisations that must always define a unified position. But citizens are not necessarily inclined to agree on a consensus position. Some of them may simply want to let off steam, regardless of the issue being discussed. In fact, opinions expressed by participants during such processes may be less about the issue that is formally under discussion than about general trust in the institution or decision-makers. This is a phenomenon also observed in other types of direct democracy, such as referenda. Another issue arises from fundamental differences in views of the world: what is important, what is relevant knowledge? This concerns what kind of expertise is seen as relevant to the discussion (Martin 2008). Citizens may find that what they regard as known or important knowledge (for example, personal experience) is not recognised as valid by professionals or officials. James Scott (1998) has brilliantly shown how state officials tend to ignore local knowledge, relying instead on knowledge seen as evidence-based and universal. For instance, city planners have frequently built and restructured cities based on ideal views of what city life should be like, rather than accepting residents’ views on what city life actually is. A related point is that views of what is important to discuss may vary radically. On the part of citizens, there may be interest in bread-and-butter issues that affect them directly. However, to organisational representatives, these may seem anecdotal and trivial. The latter may prefer to discuss long-term visions and strategic planning issues, which citizens will regard as overly abstract or irrelevant. Thus, both sides may end

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up feeling that they tried to put the real issues on the table, but that the other side is ignoring them. This is a tragic, but all too common misunderstanding. Finally, citizens may feel disappointed because they have the impression that little has been done with their input. There may be different reasons for this. One is simply that it may be true. If participation is organised as an afterthought, when all decisions that matter to citizens have already been taken, then there is every reason for them to feel cheated. But even if there is a serious attempt to incorporate their input, there can be a stark difference between what citizens experience and what has actually been achieved. This is because the activities may be invisible to their eyes. In fact, most activities undertaken within organisations are invisible to citizens. Officials and professionals may be working hard to achieve change, but it will usually be activity in offices, in closed networks, none of which is necessarily visible to those who will be affected by the policies. Similarly, officials may not notice how much effort has gone into the contributions made by citizens, since these generally take place in the community, far away from and invisible to the offices of the officials. Finally, the experience of time may be very different between participants. Citizens may live in a different ‘social time’ from professionals and policymakers, meaning that their temporal perspective varies with their social background. Research has shown that time horizons differ between people and that there is a relationship between time horizon and social context (Bergmann 1992). The exact nature of this relationship is disputed; nevertheless, in the context of participation, it is likely that at least a number of citizens will measure the progress of time differently from their professional counterparts. That matters, because it determines what amounts to an acceptably quick result. To a seasoned civil servant, such timing may be measured in months, if not years. For someone with a street-level perspective, it may be weeks or days. It is possible that one side is working at (what is to them) breakneck pace, while the other feels that nothing is happening. Frustration may arise, even though everyone is working towards the same goal. These conditions explain why, on average, social groups that contain aboveaverage numbers of vulnerable people are likely to be underrepresented in traditional participation processes. Unfortunately, it is exactly these groups who will stand to benefit most from being involved. This is because public services are often primarily meant for them, rather than for the groups who are well-represented in democratic processes. This is a more general pattern: the middle and higher classes are known to benefit disproportionally from public services in general (see, for example, Le Grand 2018), since they are generally much better able to demand these services effectively. A famous example is that police are more present in safe, affluent neighbourhoods than one would expect, because their residents are more likely to call and demand protection. This Matthew effect (‘whoever has will be given more’) seems to be a fact of life, which makes it all the more important that residents of less affluent neighbourhoods actively co-deliver their safety.

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Let me be clear: none of the problems discussed above are unique to vulnerable groups. No-one has a monopoly on feeling left out. Rich white CEOs may feel excluded and not taken seriously. However, the conditions that cause social vulnerability overlap with the conditions that discourage participation; in particular, the fact that vulnerable people lack the social skills and self-confidence necessary to operate effectively in certain settings. The rules of the game in democratic processes have generally been shaped by people who excel in debate and deliberation. As a consequence, although obstacles to participation face citizens of all kinds, vulnerable people are likely to suffer disproportionately from them.

What We Have Learnt Fortunately, with time we have learnt how to avoid the most obvious pitfalls (although a depressing number of participation processes are still organised the old-fashioned way). A seemingly obvious, but hard-won lesson is that effective participation requires a differentiated approach. The skills of citizens and their motives to participate differ greatly (Alford 2009; Van Eijk and Steen 2014). While it is undoubtedly efficient to involve people through a single, standardised process, such a process will not be inclusive. Vulnerable people are likely to require additional effort and a targeted approach. One of the challenges for introducing more open, participatory approaches is to make them applicable within large service-delivering organisations, which would require some form of standardised quality assessment. For instance, could co-production be included in organisational quality systems, as part of the routine measurement (Loeffler 2021)? A key question for the future is how to reconcile such standardisation with one of the key aims of co-production, which is to make the process of service delivery more personal and less standardised. A key condition arising from the literature is that citizens should be supported in the process of participating. Such support can be provided either by professionals or by trained volunteers. But it is more easily said than done: especially with vulnerable people, this can be a challenge, because professionals will need to juggle several roles to achieve a successful process of co-production. By implication, this requires a combination of several qualities and skills. In the context of derelict neighbourhoods, Vanleene (2020) examined how street-level professionals adopted the different roles of friend, leader, representative or mediator. The findings showed that it was especially important for professionals to take a leadership role, whereas a role as friend actually ran the risk of alienating residents. An alternative or complementary strategy to support vulnerable people is to enlist the help of citizen experts (Andreassen 2018). For instance, former drug addicts can be trained to coach current addicts. This can greatly reduce the barriers to participation, because it allows the people in question to interact with others who (to some extent) share their experiences and language. Again, such benefits do not come easily:

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providing such support requires adequate training, regulation and autonomy for the experts involved. Research will have to show what should and can realistically be expected of citizen experts. What we have also learnt from past processes of participation is that smart practical organising can go a long way in lowering thresholds and improving the quality of the process. For instance, it is more effective to invite people personally, rather than making them respond to a general call, or select them at random. This strategy was employed, for instance, by the French government, when in 2019 it organised a nationwide debate in response to popular unrest. This prevented any particular group from dominating the local talks. Another method that has been proven to work is to make meetings small-scale, allowing people to discuss in small groups. This also has the benefit of encouraging a more constructive dialogue. Creative methods of dialogue have been invented that invite consensus and prevent the processes from being monopolised by a minority of hard-line opponents. Participatory budgeting is an example of such a method: it requires participants to allocate funds as part of citizens’ assemblies (Sintomer et al. 2008). It forces participants to make trade-offs among themselves, rather than merely criticising others’ proposals. Simply saying ‘no’ is not an option. Of course, all of this is still a deliberative process, which still gives an edge to the most articulate. However, if the process of participation is designed carefully, the threshold can be lowered significantly. Another valuable lesson learnt over time is that policymakers and professionals should preferably go out to meet citizens, rather than the other way round. This means meeting vulnerable people in their own habitat, instead of inviting them to public buildings where they may not feel comfortable. Having meetings in places close to people’s homes, in a setting familiar to them (say the canteen of the local football team) can make participatory processes seem more familiar and less intimidating. Furthermore, it is important to see such meetings as part of a longer process. Effective participation requires sustained communication, clarifying the nature and extent of the participation, managing expectations, clarifying the follow-up. Physical meetings are only one part of a longer process of relationship-building. A key question for the future is how digital technologies will affect this type of process. Public management literature has so far been overwhelmingly optimistic on this point (for example, see Linders 2012). Digital communication tools can potentially decrease reliance on physical meetings and involve people in their homes. This can make a huge difference for people who, for health or social reasons, are unwilling or unable to go out (e.g. frail elderly people). It also allows quicker and more entertaining participation for those who might otherwise not be interested, by introducing elements of gamification (Mergel 2016). Alternatively, citizens may get access to greater amounts of raw data, allowing them to assess the performance of public agencies independently or take initiatives of their own. However, caution would be wise. Such opportunities do arise, but they rely on the specific application of certain technologies. At the same time, there have been developments in the opposite direction: a

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trend away from participation, with more decisions based on sensor readings and algorithms. In the end, co-production may end up squeezed between selforganised citizens’ initiatives and highly centralised machine decisions (Lember et al. 2019). With respect to participation, that would leave vulnerable people in a worse position than they are in now.

Will Co-production Be Different? Given that we have learnt these lessons, will co-production make a difference? This will depend very much on how it is shaped in practice, by whom, with whom and where. It is impossible to devise a secret recipe that will work for everyone. Still, it is possible to define some general expectations. Co-production was defined as a relationship between a paid employee of an organisation and (groups of) individual citizens that requires a direct and active contribution from these citizens to the work of the organisation. This contribution can consist of both helping to design individual services (say, codesigning a treatment plan) and implementing them personally. If we review the reasons why vulnerable people do not participate, and how co-production changes the nature of the process, there are good reasons to suppose that it will indeed be different—at least to some extent. One of the prime reasons for the lack of participation was that people are overburdened and that, facing the choice how to allocate their scarce time, they will opt to spend it elsewhere. That could still be the case for co-production. However, the difference is that it individualises participation, allowing citizens to help design and implement services or products that are particular, and particularly important, to them. That makes it far easier to create a sense of urgency. People may not give much thought to the strategic policies of their local hospital, but they will care about their own medical treatment. Parents may not care for school board meetings and general discussions of school performance, but they will be interested in their own child’s progress. The personal approach also makes any effects of co-production more obvious: clients, or their close relatives, will be quick to notice whether anything has changed. Another reason why participatory processes fail to be inclusive is that they require skills and cultural capital that many vulnerable people do not possess. On this point, it is less straightforward what co-production could achieve. All participatory processes require the articulation of desires and needs with some basic clarity, of which not everyone is capable. All efforts to participate, however low the threshold, require a minimal degree of self-efficacy (Parrado et al. 2013; Fledderus 2016). Again, it is unlikely everyone can muster this. However, co-production can be about ‘doing’ as well as ‘talking’, which does make a difference (Parrado et al. 2013). To stay with the example of schools, parents may feel uncomfortable speaking in public to other parents, but may be perfectly happy running a stand during a school festival, or helping their children with homework (Honingh et al. 2018). The types of skills demanded

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will be more varied. In other words, co-production will not work where basic preconditions for participation are lacking, but it may work for a larger number of people. A third reason why vulnerable people have generally played only a small part in traditional participation processes is that the knowledge they bring deviates strongly from the rational-scientific knowledge which is regarded as legitimate in bureaucratic or professional processes. At the level of management and strategy, it can be hard to see the relevance of individual views and experiences, but few would deny that people are experts on their own (families’) lives. A teacher has the better knowledge of didactics, but the parent has the better knowledge of the child. Combining the two types of knowledge makes obvious sense. Co-production therefore makes it easier to integrate experiential knowledge, because in individual cases these are inherently relevant and because it does not demand specialist scientific knowledge. Of course, this is assuming that professionals are willing to listen. It is not only the vulnerable people who will need convincing that this is worthwhile. Although some evidence suggests that under the right conditions professionals are willing to engage in co-production (Steen and Tuurnas 2018) and that they can be trained to do so more effectively (Honingh et al. 2018), we do not yet know nearly enough about the conditions under which professionals are likely to engage in co-production. Another potential advantage is that it is relatively easy to organise coproduction in a familiar setting. Discussions on topics affecting all clients of an organisation are often organised in a public setting, in large groups. However, as noted earlier, small-scale meetings tend to get the best out of people. Coproduction, by its nature, is often small-scale. For instance, discussions of the progress of an individual treatment or a child’s school performance will usually be held privately. Where co-production is organised through digital technologies, this effect may be especially strong. It may allow people to get involved from their own homes, at their own leisure. Where people feel insecure, this may be a great advantage in drawing them out. It may also be possible to use more visual, less language-reliant means of participating (e.g. through images). Potentially, this could reduce major obstacles to the participation of vulnerable people. However, as noted earlier, technological advances may also make it easier for professionals to make decisions for, rather than with, vulnerable people. For example, it is already possible for welfare departments to assess with some accuracy, on the basis of accumulated data, which young people are likely to get in trouble, and to design targeted interventions accordingly (Berk 2019; Bovaird and Loeffler 2014). By contrast, co-production may appear rather inefficient and unnecessary. All in all, co-production seems to have a better chance of involving vulnerable people than traditional types of participation, because it removes some of the elements that make the latter less accessible and attractive. However, co-production is not a cure-for-all. It would be utopian to suggest that this

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approach (or indeed any approach) will work for everyone, or that it will ever be accepted in all organisations (Batalden et al. 2016). Co-production is a solution that will work well for certain people—the question is for how many. To determine this, we will need less conjecture, and more experiments and pilots.

Conclusion Vulnerable people are underrepresented in many areas of life, including participatory processes. In this chapter, I have explored whether co-production can be expected to change this. The analysis allows room for cautious optimism. Co-production could indeed make a difference, in that it lowers the threshold for participation in a number of ways. Especially where it is individualised and where the format of the interaction does not rely too heavily on deliberative skills, individuals who have hitherto been underrepresented could become engaged in greater numbers. This is not to say that everyone can be mobilised: that would be a fantasy. It is also likely that different types of people will require a different kind of approach; in other words, we should not think of co-production as a single type of method, but as a family of methods. The fact is: there is insufficient evidence to make any firm statements one way or the other. At this point, co-production is mostly a promise. However, things could move quickly. There was a time when a (perceived) lack of education and sound judgement was used as an argument to exclude the majority of the population from voting. Likewise, participation in decision-making is often still felt to be beyond the capabilities of certain kinds of people. Yet coproduction has been known to work for welfare recipients, mental health care patients, drug addicts, refugees and victims of abuse. It is unlikely to work for everyone, but perhaps for more people than we would expect.

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CHAPTER 28

Risk and Resilience Management in Co-production Jon Coaffee, João Porto de Albuquerque, and Vangelis Pitidis

Introduction In the twenty-first century ideas and practices of resilience have become a central organising metaphor within policymaking processes and the expanding institutional framework of national security and emergency preparedness. For many, resilience offers an integrated approach for coping with all manner of disruptive events, as well as a new way to engage with future uncertainty (Coaffee 2019; Walker and Cooper 2011; Zolli and Healy 2013; Chandler 2014). As we will argue in this chapter, resilience-thinking has subsequently been utilised to ‘extend’ established risk management approaches and methodologies and to advance ways of surviving and thriving in the future through adaptation and long-term transformative action. Here we view resilience as a new approach to governing complexity and as a supposed antidote—a new biopolitical nomos —to such destabilisation and insecurity, in contrast to a conventional probabilistic ‘risk-based’ world. In such new governing assemblages, co-production has emerged as a key process in terms of how risk is assessed and acted upon. Here we see co-production as about developing equitable resilience outcomes through a process of shared dialogue between different stakeholders, including local communities. As we have argued elsewhere, the building of such resilience is about new forms of joined-up J. Coaffee (B) School of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. P. de Albuquerque · V. Pitidis Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_28

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governance which will be ‘most effective when it involve[s] a mutual and accountable network of civic institutions, agencies and individual citizens working in partnership towards common goals within a common strategy’ (Coaffee et al. 2008, 3). Increasingly, the focus of resilience policy is being directed towards smaller spatial scales and everyday activities nested in the local area, necessitating a broader historical and intercultural understanding of how individuals, communities and organisations respond to change by developing or enhancing resilience. From this perspective, building the resilience of the individual, institutions and the neighbourhood is the pathway to resilience of the whole. In the context of place and communities, it is thus the social consequences or ‘the ability of communities to withstand external shocks to their social infrastructure’ (Adger 2000, 347) that is arguably of greatest significance and concern. In contrast to traditional approaches to risk management, which have relied upon a narrow range of governmental stakeholders, contemporary and future schemas are looking to draw a full range of individuals, professionals and community groups into decision-making at a range of spatial scales. In many respects, such localised resilience practices mirror broader trends in public governance of the past twenty years where the regulatory state ‘steers’ via strategy and the ‘rowing’ of implementation is carried out locally (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). Here, resilience practices become nested in the local area, providing a fit with wider Government ambitions to create a new, more community-driven, social contract between citizens and the state (Coaffee 2013). As a result, resilience approaches become realised not through state institutions, but upon localised networked responses, with governance dispersed more widely across key stakeholders and sectors. This, as Bovaird and Loeffler (2012, 1121) have highlighted, has placed an emphasis on user and community co-production of public services and outcomes and where top-down approaches are blended with bottom-up viewpoints with ‘professionals and citizens making better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes or improved efficiency’. The shift towards localised resilience approaches is also not without critique. Much of this critical assessment concerns the alleged tarnishing of resilience ideas through neoliberal decentralisation and a post-political landscape, understood as the foreclosing of political choice and the delegation of decisionmaking to technocratic experts. The emerging canon of work in ‘critical resilience studies’ has highlighted the ways in which resilience policy and practice indicates a shift in the state’s policies, reflecting a desire to step back from its responsibilities to ensure the protection of the population during crisis and to delegate to certain professions, private companies, communities and individuals. Through the lens of resilience policy, we can arguably chart new forms of precautionary governance, attempts to create resilient citizens, the drawing in of a range of stakeholders to the resilience agenda, and the corresponding adoption of new roles and responsibilities in enacting policy priorities. While we are sympathetic to critical accounts and especially their powerful expose of

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who wins and who does not in neoliberal governance, we prefer to focus our analysis on a more inductive and performative approach that views resilience as a multiplicity of related, and often-experimental practices. Like Brassett and Vaughan-Williams (2015, 34), in this chapter we ‘seek to reflect and develop upon a notion of resilience as an ongoing interaction between various (and often conflicting) actors and logics, one which can be viewed as far more contingent, incomplete and contestable in both its characteristics and effects than is usually acknowledged in the existing literature’. Moreover, previous research has revealed that the implementation of resilience is not neutral and urges us to consider the significance of the instigators, beneficiaries and objectives of measures that are ostensibly designed to increase resilience. Increasingly, with talk of resilience offering the potential for radical and transformative social change, there are coinciding calls to reflect upon issues of social justice (Ziervogel et al. 2017; Turnhout et al. 2019) and to ask questions such as: how we can ensure that the rolling out of resilience is even-handed and produces outcomes that are more equitable? How are existing systems of governance ensuring that marginalised voices are incorporated in decision-making and the construction of resilient futures? While there is much discussion regarding the capacity of resilience to promote safer development, concern has been expressed that the techno-managerial frameworks that measure and monitor development operate according to rigid, quantitatively defined parameters which do not consider local variation and intra-urban inequalities, and, in effect hardwire such inequitable processes into future decision-making (Ulbrich et al. 2018). This has stimulated calls for approaches to recalibrate conventional methodologies to account for this differential socio-spatially determined vulnerability to natural hazards, especially in the global south, and to embrace more collaborative and co-produced ways of pursuing and assessing resilience. Within this context of the turn towards resilience as an antidote for risk, crisis and uncertainty, over many years we have collectively evolved a range of mixed-methodologies to explore how resilience has changed the way in which society and policymaking communities have responded to emerging risk and how the governance of risk has transformed. We have looked at how risk management has morphed into concerns with resilience through a paradigm shift in critical infrastructure protection approaches across Western Europe where social and organisational issues are now increasingly taken into account (Coaffee and Clarke 2015). Similarly, we have looked at how the resilience of communities and public spaces against terrorist violence in the UK can be enhanced by dialogue between security actors and civil society groups (Coaffee 2013) and, how greater community engagement and the incorporation of volunteered geographic information in risk-based decision-making has enabled advancing bespoke urban resilience strategies for earthquake and flood-prone neighbourhoods across Europe (Pitidis et al. 2018; Albuquerque et al. 2015).

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Across all these and other projects, to be transformative and empowering, new or complementary methodological approaches are needed to engage the local residents more inclusively than is allowed in the data sourcing methods used in traditional risk assessments, such as censuses, household surveys or specialised field surveys. To further unpack this dynamic whereby we can integrate citizen-generated data with official data sources, this chapter will explore an ongoing co-designed and co-produced project we have been engaged in poor local communities in Brazil that are at severe risk of flooding. In this Waterproofing Data project we have adopted emerging methods, such as participatory mapping of risk perception and citizen-generated data into decision-making processes and begun to bring about transformation in the ways in which the governance of flood resilience is conducted and made more equitable. Waterproofing Data brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and institutions from the three collaborating countries (UK, Brazil and Germany) in coordination with Belmont Forum’s Transformations to Sustainability programme (project grant ES/S006982/1) that ran from 2018 to 2021. The project gave a prominent role to the process of local data collection and community resilience, as well as its connection to holistic disaster risk management as articulated in recent international development such as the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. The Sendai framework, for example, emphasised a renewed commitment to promoting the local assessment of risk of disasters in order to enhance implementation of disaster resilience and to build back better. This framework also sought to stimulate concerted efforts to foster collaboration and partnership institutions and enhance the implementation of equitable resilience policies and practices.

Framing Resilience as Co-production The UN Habitat dialogue note Raising Standards of Urban Resilience (2014, 2) highlighted the imperative to develop tools and methodologies aimed at providing a measurement of urban resilience that would underpin more equitable urban development. However, as they are currently arranged, disaster risk reduction and resilience policies usually frame risk in ways that are not sensitive to the local reality of marginalised urban neighbourhoods, and are thus unable to capture highly localised aspects of such neighbourhoods. In particular, they overlook the human/social aspects of vulnerability and factors relating to local physical infrastructure that are crucial for effective reduction of the economic and human costs of natural hazards. This has become a particularly important issue in Latin America, which has undergone accelerated urban growth in the past 50 years and it is presently one of the most urbanised areas of the world. One consequence of this trend is the proliferation of marginalised urban neighbourhoods which are not only disproportionately exposed to natural hazards, but also have less economic and social capital to adapt and respond to their consequences. This has led to

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a number of initiatives designed to anticipate and manage risk more effectively, so as to reduce the impact of disasters. However, a noticeable implementation gap in the design and delivery of equitable resilience is evident. This is not only attributable to a lack of resources, but also to highly complex social, economic, political and institutional reasons, where there is a disconnect between official risk management and development policy and the differential needs of people in marginalised groups. In response to these concerns, the Waterproofing Data: Engaging Stakeholders in Sustainable Flood Risk Governance for Urban Resilience project has adopted an innovative methodological approach, analysing data in novel ways in order to generate new knowledge and stimulate new practices that might improve flood resilience for all. Our approach to data draws from and extends the established literature emphasising the significance of big data and digital technologies in the transformation of urban life (e.g. Batty 2013; Chourabi et al. 2012). Most of this work approaches data in a conventional way, as something generated by scientific and other digital devices and sensors, to be fed into centralised systems and then acted upon and used for decision-making by scientists, members of government and other authorities. Arguably, such data practices are reliant on long-held quantitative modelling tools and provide broad and scalable baseline measures that might be of interest to policy makers, but are currently developed at a level of abstraction that does not fully account for local context and citizen engagement. As such, better understanding of the complex dynamics of risk, resilience and development requires a mixed method approach involving quantitative and qualitative measures to study communities in situ and to combine this with a generalised framework that provides a relatively aggregated picture of exposure to shocks and stress. Here Cutter et al. (2010, 18) have argued that in advancing indexes for measuring resilience ‘baseline indicators provide the first “broad brush” of the patterns of disaster resilience within and between places and the underlying factors contributing to it’ and that ‘a second step is a more detailed analysis within jurisdictions to assess place-specific capacities in each of these areas (social, economic, institutional, infrastructure, community) and the development of fine-tuned and local appropriate mechanisms for enhancing disaster resilience’. Assessing the management of resilience thus requires both a qualitative in-depth understanding of communities alongside longitudinal analysis to track vulnerable groups exposed to risk linking the interaction of people to hazards across time and space to ensure spatial and social justice (Coaffee and Lee 2016). To extend conventional and top-down data and assessment practices, and to reframe resilience as a dynamic policy mechanism to manage complexity and transform governance processes rather than a conservative practice and outcome of good development, in Waterproofing Data we focused on the active role of citizen-generated data and how this might be hybridised with official data sets and risk models. Our approach sought to use a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches to collect and collate data proactively

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to build ties between the different stakeholder groups linked to environmental risk events in our study areas in Brazil. More specifically, Waterproofing Data investigated the governance of waterrelated risks, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of data practices. Typically, data flows up from local levels to scientific ‘centres of expertise’, and then flood-related alerts and interventions flow back down through local governments and into communities. Rethinking how flood-related data is produced, and how it flows, can help build sustainable, flood resilient communities. To this end, we developed a range of innovative methods around data practices, across different sites and scales. These methods are related to three core objectives: 1. Making visible existing flows of flood-related data through tracing data across multiple scales. 2. Generating new types of data at the local level by engaging citizens through the creation of multimodal interfaces, which sense, collect and communicate flood data. 3. Integrating citizen-generated data with other data using geocomputational techniques. In essence, these methodological interventions have the potential to transform how flood-related data is produced and flows, creating new co-produced governance arrangements between citizens, governments and flood experts and, ultimately, increasing community resilience related to floods in vulnerable communities of São Paulo and Acre, Brazil. Moreover, our approach sought to overcome current siloed framings of risk and poverty/development by widening the understanding of risks and enhancing local capabilities through an innovative, transdisciplinary research approach that addressed how multistakeholder engagement of disaster-prone urban neighbourhoods can expand the understanding of risks, vulnerabilities and capabilities to integrate risk reduction and local sustainable development, in more equitable ways. In posing this question, we attempted to reverse conventional perspectives on disaster risks that are primarily based on decontextualised, exogenous models and definitions of risks and development, which fail to capture the particular realities of urban poor neighbourhoods. Instead, we adopted a dialogic approach inspired by the Pedagogy of the Oppressed developed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970) in order to develop an approach that reframes citizen sensing as a critical pedagogical process (de Albuquerque and de Almeida 2020). This approach enabled us to centre on the engagement of residents of urban poor neighbourhoods in a process of research co-production together with a multidisciplinary research team (including engineering, environmental science, humanities and the social sciences) and stakeholders of

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local governmental and non-governmental organisations involved in disaster risk reduction and local development. The Waterproofing Data project provided a new perspective on ‘sensing’ in citizen science by entering into a dialogue with local communities. In addition, our critical pedagogical approach paved the way to establishing new methodologies and ethical-methodological criteria for participatory research and practices in citizen-generated data and citizen science. These should not replace the existing concerns/framings about validity (e.g. on the quality of the generated data and its ability to serve as scientific evidence) but rather, supplement them. As we have argued elsewhere (de Albuquerque and de Almeida 2020), initiatives that are based on citizen-generated data start with an encounter between two roles: the scientist (or project leaders) and citizens (or data generators). We established an analogy between these two roles and the roles of the pedagogical process: educator and learner. This analogy allows us to draw on concepts from Freire’s critical pedagogy to reframe citizen sensing and, as a result, reveal an underlying ‘constitutive tension’: the asymmetric condition between scientists and citizens requires an openness and willingness to face the risk of ‘Otherness’ so as to be truly inclusive (ibid.). Understanding the participative production of data from this perspective, means that the relationship between scientist and citizen is established as a dialogical process, in which the modes of engagement between citizens, scientists and digital technologies can lead to empowerment, rather than a purely instrumental activity that originates from the asymmetric roles of scientists and citizens and from the differences in their cultural and epistemic practices. Our Freirean perspective is thus not only aimed at highlighting the perils of disregarding the different types of asymmetries and inequality in community-based or citizen science projects (e.g. with regard to education, gender, economic power and worldviews), but also proposing a dialogical approach as a means of dealing with them in a productive way. This approach can enable new ways of carrying out research projects that are able to leverage the realities, worldviews and epistemologies of marginalised and disadvantaged people, which is likely to be particularly important in the ‘global South’. This approach can contribute to the establishment of empowering and ‘humanised’ dialogical relationships, and thus enable us to regain the confidence needed collectively to undertake truth-building processes for the co-production of knowledge. With this approach, on the Waterproofing Data project we sought to expand the understanding of risks, vulnerabilities and potentialities by rethinking how environmental risk data is produced, how it is used, and how it might enable transformations that close the implementation gap by delivering enhanced resilience for marginalised communities. Furthermore, the methods and results of this case study were used as the basis for a transcultural dialogue with government organisations and local administration involved in flood risk management in Germany and the UK. The project produced novel knowledge and insights, enhancing the research capacity across the interdisciplinary fields of expertise of its co-investigators: urban resilience and urban geography,

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public administration, science and technology studies, risk and governance (social sciences); media studies and digital arts (arts and humanities); social informatics, geo-computation (engineering); environmental hazard models and hydrology (environmental sciences). Thus, this project has the potential to set a research agenda by acting as a model for future interdisciplinary research methodologies on building resilience to natural hazards through contributions in three major areas: (a) novel participatory and inclusive approaches that take account of existing gender, economic and social inequalities to include the perspective of vulnerable communities through crowdsourced geographic information and citizen-generated data; (b) improved understanding and design of social processes of decision-making involved in monitoring and coordination; and (c) innovative approaches to improve exposure models based on citizen-generated data and co-production of community-based risk reduction.

Facilitating Co-production Through Dialogue In the Waterproofing Data project, we focused upon citizen-generated data from a dialogic, critical pedagogical lens. Here citizen engagement is not merely a means to gather data, but an opportunity for social learning for citizens and researchers (de Albuquerque and de Almeida 2020) through which both can acquire a new critical consciousness of the components of risks faced by marginalised communities and of how to improve flood resilience. Our approach proceeded by mobilising local communities for strengthening local capacities and moves towards enhancing resilience by meaningfully inducing changes in local conditions. This is based on the Freirean concept of ‘conscientização’, i.e. researchers and citizens of marginalised communities acquire a new critical consciousness through this process with which they ‘learn how to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action’ (Freire 1970, 17). Therefore, the transformation of flood risk governance acquires a deeply rooted local dimension that could potentially lead to the mainstreaming of the new practices. Furthermore, this dialogue also engaged with the perspectives of environmental mapping and local government agencies, so that the data generated could be used as trusted evidence to make resilience policy mechanisms more sensitive to the different forms of intra-urban inequalities that mediate vulnerability and resilience. This combinatory approach is aimed at building horizontal and vertical ties between the different stakeholder groups linked to environmental risk in our study areas, with a focus on how (new) data practices can underpin an enhanced understanding of risk to improve risk governance and achieve more equitable resilience outcomes. From the outset, we engaged with marginalised urban neighbourhoods in the cities of São Paulo and Rio Branco, Brazil, which are situated in flood-prone areas to produce citizen-generated data that collaboratively and inclusively enhanced understandings of the local context and vulnerabilities, while also generating evidence for advocacy and pro-poor policymaking. We

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adopted a dialogic co-production approach to citizen-generated data, which relies upon our well-established partnership with community-based initiatives in these areas as well as with governmental agencies involved in disaster risk reduction and local planning and development. More specifically, the Waterproofing Data project has proceeded in five interlinked work packages (see Fig. 28.1) that investigated our three research objectives through the development of innovative research methods, which operated across different sites and scales: (a) the macro-level of ‘centres of expertise’ on flood risk management; (b) the meso-level of local government administration; and (c) the micro-level of communities. Workpackage 1, Making data flows visible, developed a method for making visible the existing data practices in the governance of flood events. One of the research sites is the ‘centre of expertise’, CEMADEN (National Centre for Disaster Monitoring and Early-Warning), which acts as a major hub for current data related to the monitoring and alerting of flooding events in Brazil. With CEMADEN as a starting point, we then follow the flows of data to the two local government sites (São Paulo City Council, Acre City Government). Research in this work package revolved around ethnographic research at each of the three sites, in an attempt to understand which data different decisionmakers use and why, within the context of monitoring and responding to flooding events at the levels of ‘centres of expertise’ and local government. This has allowed us to understand not only exactly how data flows within

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and between these sites, but also how these flows shape the capacity to act in relation to flooding events in site-specific ways. Workpackage 2, Community engagement through data circulation, combines a number of humanities and social science methods for engaging citizens through the creation of multimodal interfaces for sensing, collecting and communicating of flood data (incorporating flood memories, narratives and local/lay knowledges). Our methods have brought citizen (their placememories of flooding) and science (the geo-localisation of flooding) knowledges together in new ways for rethinking the relation and passages between cultural and scientific types of knowledge (Garde-Hansen et al. 2017). We have engaged with intergenerational groups in local communities not only to produce data (which will flow back to the centres of expertise) but also to document local knowledge and enable skill/knowledge transfer within the communities. This work package therefore included intergenerational methods of knowledge production based on several methods and approaches with the goal of extending what flooding data can mean by illuminating experiences, myths, memories, collective knowledge, personal mediations and anecdotes of flooding and flood risk. In this context, co-produced knowledge processes highlight the variety and richness of tacit flood knowledge and help generate new types of flood-related data for the use and reflection of the affected communities and other stakeholders; and inform the integrative approach of workpackage 3. Workpackage 3, Integration and curation of data for decision support , has developed a geo-computational method to integrate heterogeneous floodrelated data of qualitative and quantitative nature from ‘authoritative sources’ from centres of expertise (workpackage 1) and citizens (workpackage 2). This method included developing data visualisation interfaces that are able to support decision-making processes of different end-user groups at different scales. Our starting point for this work was to produce detailed maps of the communities studied by using collaborative mapping techniques based on the OpenStreetMap platform. These maps served not only to provide a base reference layer, where the critical infrastructure and people exposed to flood risks can be located (Eckle et al. 2016), but also allowed us to collect ‘risk awareness maps’ (Klonner et al. 2016) by using participatory methods that enable inclusive participation while also producing geospatially precise data (de Albuquerque et al. 2019). The geographic data collected in this manner served as an additional level that allowed the integration of authoritative data sources on floods (e.g. sensors, risk maps), with the mainly qualitative data on flood memories generated and the qualitative and quantitative data revealed through ethnographic work. When integrating the various qualitative and quantitative data generated in our work to date we have been careful to take account of the different criteria used by stakeholders for assessing data quality requirements. To this end, we have put together an integrated geographic database that over time will serve as a basis to design an innovative web portal to provide a data visualisation

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interface to the information provided for the local population and centres of expertise. This portal will be used in an interactive way by the communities as well as the local authorities who can add, edit and download information. The centres of expertise will be provided with a decision-support visualisation that will allow integration into already existing applications for disaster monitoring. Workpackage 4, Transformations towards waterproofing data, involves working together with the main stakeholder groups from the first three workpackages (centres of expertise, local government and communities in São Paulo and Acre) to ensure the research conducted will have a transformative impact. While Waterproofing Data involves strong collaboration with stakeholders, and thus the conducting of the research itself is expected to deliver transformative impact, workpackage 4 was specifically designed to ensure the research is directly and thoughtfully incorporated into transformations of the data practices of key stakeholders, and that community knowledge of the research is accessible to all members of the community and beyond. Workpackage 5, Translation of waterproof data into sustainable flood risk governance, integrated the different work streams, interfaced with a broad range of policy and decision-makers and facilitated the interactions within and outside the project consortium by promoting impact workshops in Brazil, Germany and the UK. These have facilitated a transcultural comparative dialogue involving the Brazilian and European researchers and stakeholders, as well as enabling the international comparison and generalisation of lessons about sustainable flood risk governance from the project. To this end, throughout the project we facilitated policy and practice dialogue ‘impact’ workshops organised on user-centred design principles, which focused on awareness raising, mutual learning, policy foresight, networking and transferability of results across different operational contexts. These events differed from a conventional research workshop in that the primary goal was to open up questions that are frequently unanswered and unanswerable and to generate open-minded dialogue among a range of different stakeholders. The key issues and considerations under discussion in the workshops were generated by the research team in advance (through our ongoing research). In each workshop, the search for answers and the process of raising multiple ideas was possible because of the collective expertise and specialisms of the delegates. Stakeholders were not treated as passive recipients of ‘research’, but were brought into the idea generation process itself. Consequently, idea generation is not considered to be a ‘closed’ process, but as an open iterative and cumulative relationship where end users are encouraged to network and exchange knowledge and experiences, providing space for end-user considerations and needs. To facilitate this user-centred approach we adopted a World Café style format to provide an open and creative conversation on topics of mutual interest that surfaces collective knowledge, shares ideas and insights and allows everyone to gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities and challenges of developing new practices in flood risk governance. In practical terms this meant ensuring that researchers and invited end

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users were not just passively ‘placed together’ at events, but that both were integral to event design and that an active and meaningful dialogue could take place that successfully accesses the collective wisdom in the room.

Reflections and Outcomes of Dialogic Co-production of Resilience The Waterproofing data project is an example of community and research coproduction in action and has illuminated a number of questions about how we can assess the success of co-production and, what possible tensions emerge as co-produced research is conducted. Co-production and Transformative Potential The Waterproofing data project above all else was focused upon achieving transformations in sustainability and resilience in acknowledgement that existing ways of working are obdurate and not fit for purpose. This then places the emphasis upon governance and how decisions are made in processes of resilience building. New forms of governance increasingly require a shift from technical, functional bureaucratic and incremental ways of working. Contemporary governing assemblages require enhanced levels of co-production and engagement in decision-making with different networks of formal and informal institutions, people and organisations. In this sense, governance can be seen in its wider meaning, to refer to the modes and practices of the mobilisation and organisation of collective action. Such collective action increasingly has a communitarian focus on the power that communities can exercise in order to negotiate, or in some cases resist, the imposition of certain policies and practices, and to achieve policy outcomes that suit their needs. Such approaches to governance emphasise the importance of advancing new policy discourses about place quality, improving collaboration among stakeholders in developing and delivering local policies, broadening stakeholder involvement beyond traditional elites while recognising different forms of local knowledge, and building rich social networks through which new initiatives can be transmitted (Healey 1998). As such, the transformative potential we observed in Waterproofing Data in relation to flood risk governance is in line with recent research on co-production which emphasises that ‘co-production processes produce more than just knowledge; they develop capacity, build networks, foster social capital, and implement actions that contribute to sustainability’ (Norström et al. 2020). However, from the perspective of embedding greater resilience, empirical studies show that despite the popularity of resilience, its implementation sometimes leads to business-as-usual approaches neglecting social justice, or lock-in of the development path through unsustainable trajectories (Coaffee et al. 2018). This implementation gap remains between resilience as an ambitious objective and the ‘demonstrated capacity to govern resilience in practice’ at

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the urban level (Wagenaar and Wilkinson 2015, 1265). While from a governance perspective we can readily acknowledge that the building of urban resilience will be most effective when it is co-produced, municipal authorities are undoubtedly struggling to do so. This shift from traditional risk governance approaches has proved challenging because resilience implementation in public administrations is, in most cases, in conflict with bureaucratic values such as efficiency and procedural rationality, which are difficult to balance with adaptability, redundancy and innovation (Coaffee et al. 2018). The problems identified above lie at the heart of the urban resilience implementation gap and complicate attempts to advance more adaptive governance models involving co-productive efforts and collaborative decision-making. This asks key questions about change and transformational potential and in particular, how ‘mainstream’ governance discourses and practices evolve from one mode of practice to another? How are new processes and practices effected by structuring dynamics and micro-politics? And, what does it take for new innovations to be translated into ‘mainstream’ practices, in ways which transform the mainstream rather than just incorporate new ideas and practices that neutralise threats to established practices and the various power relations embedded in them? The results that emerged from the co-production approaches of the Waterproofing Data project offer initial encouragement that transformative change is possible in how flood resilience is viewed and operationalised, but these approaches are only a small first step in a much longer and complex process that will be decades in the making. What is evident is that through bringing different viewpoints, voices and data practices to the decision-making table, and in better understanding how local communities and official accounts perceive and act upon risk, we can observe a willingness to integrate these perspectives in the pursuit of greater resilience. To this end we have advanced a framework for tracking transformation in governance that focuses on change over time with regard to: (a) networks and coalitions that identify stakeholders currently engaged in the delivery of a policy area and evidence of community involvement, collaboration and partnership; (b) policy discourses reflecting how resilience is framed in official narratives and local accounts; and (c) practices that identify issues that affect the ability to deliver the policy area in an integrated fashion, as well as identifying processes that are currently advancing a space for innovation. Co-production and Critical Friendship Co-produced research is an increasingly prominent feature of the contemporary world where researchers can occupy a privileged location at the interface between theory and practice. Not only can such relations bring knowledge production and increasingly grounded and policy relevant work but the synergies generated, can also ‘open doors’ into otherwise impenetrable worlds or can facilitate access to unreachable communities of policy or identity. In

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our work, not only has Waterproofing Data witnessed transformative potential in governance terms but also in some ways has facilitated it through the research process. Co-production, often through collaborative research efforts, can bring many privileges for the academic researcher. Beyond opening doors, co-production may keep doors propped open through the development of long-standing commitments (or even of friendships) or through more formal reciprocal agreements and arrangements. While we have little doubt, and can say from our own experience, that co-production presents many opportunities, it can be challenging. In any coproduced research process there are key tensions with respect to both its conceptual direction and its practical and ethical conduct that need to be addressed. Notably, there is an overarching risk that co-produced studies may be subjected to an almost inevitable ‘pull’ into external agendas, not least due to the significant degree of often sustained engagement that is entailed with co-producing partners. There is, too, a potential blurring of boundaries between the researcher and the researched, but this should not infer that it is impossible to resist excessive influence from external agencies. Although, for instance, there may be a considerable degree of direction provided for a co-produced project, research agendas need not be excessively rigid. A key role, then, in working collaboratively, or as ‘critical friends’, is the ability to negotiate clear positionality and independence as researchers. Although the term co-production implies a degree of equality regarding the development of an overall research strategy, in practice this is a negotiated, and therefore fluid process involving research teams, sponsors and any advisory group that might be established. Therefore, a range of concerns and compromises that need to be carefully balanced frequently underwrites any such study. While undertaking co-produced research we should be aware of the comments of the academic planner, Bent Flyvbjerg, who warns us that the process of producing knowledge and the fate of projects in terms of desirable outcomes can be strongly influenced by the mechanics of power and rationality: ‘…power often ignores or designs knowledge at its convenience’ (2001, 143). At the same time, all research data, we should remember, is not collected, but is generated through complicated researcher/subject interactions. Clearly, partners—or more appropriately, co-producers—often approach a project with certain motives, and may pursue pre-determined agendas. In many cases, as recent work has argued, the political and power dimensions of co-production serve to reinforce rather than mitigate existing unequal power relations and in so doing restrict governance transformation from taking place (Turnhout et al. 2019). With these challenges and tensions in mind, as co-production research becomes ever more sought after, we need a range of tools to support core values of research to negotiate the challenging relationships and circumstances in order to both gain and retain access to research events and subjects and to meet the requirements of funders and partners. The coping strategy that we adopted was as a promoter of mutual learning; in helping develop a better

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understanding among stakeholders of the multiple viewpoints surrounding a particular issue, and in supporting their needs where appropriate. This model of the ‘critical friend’, drawn from public policy literature (Rallis and Rossman 2000), blurs the borders between the act of research and those being researched. Here, the traditional power relationship between researcher and the researched is made more equitable, with each recognising the contribution the other can make to the research process. This is complemented by our Freirean dialogical perspective, which acknowledges intrinsic asymmetry between the roles of scientists and citizens, and proposes to deal productively with this through openness and dialogue (de Albuquerque and de Almeida 2020). Following Freire, it is only by being open to face the risk of ‘Otherness’ that co-production processes will be able to promote dialogical modes of engagement that are truly empowering and capable of giving people a voice. We would argue that developing ‘critical friendship’ with a dialogical mode of collaboration is a more engaged role than that of the evaluator-type research. In essence, the researcher is not an external judge but tries to act with an independent voice, holding a mirror to those involved in subjects, and helping them reflect upon their own practice. The critical friend must also be a storyteller and present opinions for scrutiny. As Coaffee and Diamond (2008, 95) noted: ‘It is not only important to have the skills necessary to represent competing narratives, but also to identify themes and questions which challenge particular narratives’. Ideally, the negotiation of the critical friend status should be held at the outset of research to help resolve (as far as possible) issues before the study gets underway, and to outline the expectation of co-producers at the outset. The Essential Future of Co-production Research Our recent experience of working with and co-producing knowledge alongside policy makers in the area of resilience has been rewarding, yet immensely challenging. For all partners it has been a steep learning curve, involving fundamental questioning of the different cultures of universities, local citizenship and policy communities. Each co-producer has a preferred or traditional way of working with their associated timescales, the outputs that are required and procedures that must be implemented to deal with data or sensitive information. As co-produced research becomes more the norm than the exception, these cultural impediments will lessen. Equally, it has become clear to us that co-production is also a central factor in new modes of knowledge building and research, in reshaping local governance dynamics and transforming how context-specific decisions are made and implemented. Simply rolling out classical models of superficial community and external stakeholder consultation where local citizens or businesses become coopted or ‘responsibilised’ to fulfil state-type roles is not sufficient. This then, places co-production as a necessary ingredient in research looking to transform conventional and institutionalised power relations in decision-making in

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order to secure the future through a better understanding of how we respond, in a flexible way, to all manner of risks and crisis. This helps explain how resilience has become central for how we govern uncertainty through engaging in dialogic co-production. As Galuszka (2019, 155) has noted in his studies of urban planning in the global south, ‘it can be argued that co-productive governance provides a flexibility to change, adapt and update proposed solutions. In contrast to classic participatory spaces, this can mean that civil society actors are not merely consulted regarding specific decisions, but are active implementers of them too’.

References Adger, N. (2000). ‘Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related?’, Progress in Human Geography, 24(3), pp. 347–364. Albuquerque, J. P., Herfort, B., Brenning, A., and Zipf, A. (2015). A Geographic Approach for Combining Social Media and Authoritative Data Towards Identifying Useful Information for Disaster Management. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 29(4), pp. 667–689. Batty, M. (2013). ‘Big Data, Smart Cities and City Planning’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 3(3), pp. 274–279. Bovaird, T. and Loeffler, E. (2012). ‘From Engagement to Co-Production: The Contribution of Users and Communities to Outcomes and Public Value’, Voluntas International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 23(4), pp. 1119– 1138. Brassett, J. and Vaughan-Williams, N. (2015). ‘Security and the Performative Politics of Resilience: Critical Infrastructure Protection and Humanitarian Emergency Preparedness’, Security Dialogue, 46(1), pp. 32–50. Chandler, D. (2014). Resilience: The Governance of Complexity (London: Routledge). Chourabi, H., Nam, T., Walker, S., Gil-Garcia, J. R., Mellouli, S., Nahon, K., and Scholl, H. J. (2012). ‘Understanding Smart Cities: An Integrative Framework’, in 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 2289–2297). IEEE. Coaffee, J. (2013). ‘Rescaling and Responsibilising the Politics of Urban Resilience: From National Security to Local Place-Making’, Politics, 33(4), pp. 240–252. Coaffee, J. (2019). Futureproof: How to Build Resilience in an Uncertain World (New Haven: Yale University Press). Coaffee, J. and Clarke, J. (2015). ‘On Securing the Generational Challenge of Urban Resilience’, Town Planning Review, 86(3), pp. 249–255. Coaffee, J. and Diamond, J. (2008). ‘Reflections on the Role of the Evaluator: Recognising Value for Money and Creative Learning Within Regeneration Evaluation’, Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal, 2(1), pp. 86–99. Coaffee, J. and Lee, P. (2016). Urban Resilience: Planning for Risk Crisis and Uncertainty (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Coaffee, J., Murkami-Wood, D., and Rogers, P. (2008). The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Coaffee, J., Therrien, M., Chelleri, L., Henstra, D., Aldrich, D., Mitchell, C., Tsenkova, S., and Rigaud, E. (2018). ‘Urban Resilience Implementation: A Policy Challenge and Research Agenda for the 21st Century’, Journal of Contingencies

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and Crisis Management, 26, pp. 403–410. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973. 12233. Cutter, S. L., Burton, C. G., and Emrich, C. T. (2010). ‘Disaster Resilience Indicators for Benchmarking Baseline Conditions’, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 7(1), Article 51. de Albuquerque, J. P., and de Almeida, A. A. (2020). ‘Modes of Engagement: Reframing ‘Sensing’ and Data Generation in Citizen Science for Empowering Relationships’, in Davies, T. and Mah, A. (2020). Toxic Truths: Environmental Justice and Citizen Science in a Post Truth Age (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press). de Albuquerque, J. P, Godwin, Y., Pitidis, V., and Ulbrich, P. (2019). Towards a Participatory Methodology for Community Data Generation to Analyse Urban Health Inequalities: A Multi-Country Case Study. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Science. Eckle, M., de Albuquerque, J. P., Herfort, B., Leiner, R., Jacobs, C., and Zipf, A. (2016). Leveraging OpenStreetMap to Support Flood Risk Management in Municipalities: A Prototype Decision Support System. In Proceedings of the ISCRAM Conference—Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 2016. Flyvbjerg, B. (2001). Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder). Galuszka, J. (2019). ‘What Makes Urban Governance Co-Productive? Contradictions in the Current Debate on Co-Production’, Planning Theory, 18(1), pp. 143–160. Garde-Hansen, J., McEwen, L. J., Holmes, A., and Jones, O. (2017). ‘Sustainable Flood Memory: Remembering as Resilience’, Memory Studies, 10(4), pp. 384–405. Healey, P. (1998). ‘Building Institutional Capacity Through Collaborative Approaches to Urban Planning’, Environment and Planning A, 30(9), pp. 1531–1546, p. 1546. Klonner, C., Marx, S., Usón, T., and Höfle, B. (2016). Risk Awareness Maps of Urban Flooding Via OSM Field Papers—Case Study Santiago de Chile. In Proceedings of the ISCRAM 2016 Conference. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pp. 1–14. Norström, A. V., Cvitanovic, C., Löf, M. F., et al. (2020). ‘Principles for Knowledge Co-Production in Sustainability Research’, Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/ 10.1038/s41893-019-0448-2. Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1993). Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector (New York: Plume Publications). Pitidis, V., Tapete, D., Coaffee, J., Kapetas, L., and de Albuquerque, J. P. (2018). ‘Understanding the Implementation Challenges of Urban Resilience Policies: Investigating the Influence of Urban Geological Risk in Thessaloniki, Greece’, Sustainability, 10(10), p. 3573. Rallis, S. and Rossman, G. (2000). ‘Dialogue for Learning: Evaluator as Critical Friend’, New Directions in Evaluation, 86, pp. 81–92. Turnhout, E., Metze, T., Wyborn, C., Klenk, N., and Louder, E. (2019). ‘The Politics of Co-Production: Participation, Power, and Transformation’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 42(1), pp. 15–21. Ulbrich, P., de Albuquerque, J. P., and Coaffee, J. (2018). ‘The Impact of Urban Inequalities on Monitoring Progress Towards the Sustainable Development Goals: Methodological Considerations’, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 8(1), p. 6.

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United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat). (2014). Raising Standards of Urban Resilience. Wagenaar, H. and Wilkinson, C. (2015). ‘Enacting Resilience: A Performative Account of Governing for Urban Resilience’, Urban Studies, 52(7), pp. 1265–1284. Walker, J. and Cooper, M. (2011). ‘Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation’, Security Dialogue, 42(2), pp. 143– 160. Ziervogel, G., Pelling, M., Cartwright, A., Chu, E., Deshpande, T., Harris, L., Hyams, K., Kaunda, J., Klaus, B., Michael, K., Pasquini, L., Pharoah, R., Rodina, L., Scott, D., and Zweig, P. (2017). Inserting Rights and Justice into Urban Resilience: A Focus on Everyday Risk, Environment and Urbanization, 29(1), pp. 123–138. Zolli, A. and Healy, A. (2013). Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (London: Headline).

PART IX

Governance of Co-production

CHAPTER 29

Can Co-production Promote Participatory Public Governance? Victor A. Pestoff

Introduction Weber’s ideal of modern public bureaucracy was based on a military-like hierarchical command and control model. This model became the central point of reference for the development of the public sector for most of the twentieth century. It was also adopted as a key organisational concept by industry and manufacture in advanced countries until recently. Yet, it is increasingly apparent that it is both inadequate and inappropriate in the twenty-first century, when services and work in the service sector have become the predominant form of production and employment in developed countries. Ostrom (1996) and Osborne et al. (2013) underline the differences between producing goods and providing services. Unlike goods, services often require the input or active contribution of the users or clients in the production process itself. This makes them co-producers of such services. Personal social services, like preschool, healthcare, eldercare and handicap care, etc., are often considered ‘relational goods’ by economists. Long-term or ‘enduring welfare services’ impose high transaction costs on dissatisfied users who might consider exit options. This makes voice more important for expressing user or client dissatisfaction and/or for making suggestions to improve their service experience (Pestoff 1998).

V. A. Pestoff (B) Ersta Sköndal Bräcke University College, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]

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Enduring welfare services in Europe and many other developed countries are now facing a complex and partly contradictory mix of challenges. Fiscal strains combined with a New Public Management agenda have resulted in cutbacks and calls for improved efficiency in public-funded services, regardless of provider. This development significantly contributes to a growing concern about service quality in public services. Other developments, such as increased demand due to an aging population and an increased level of individualisation of service provision also add to the mix. The proposed solutions to these challenges in European public services help illustrate the severity of the problem. One solution suggested by market proponents is to further concentrate resources in larger production units and increase efficiency in order to ‘provide more care with better quality at a lower cost’. Taking healthcare as an example, the problem with this proposal is that the Scandinavian countries already have some of the most streamlined healthcare sectors in the world and there is probably a limit to how ‘efficient’ you can make healthcare services while maintaining acceptable levels of service quality. Another possible solution would be to increase public funding, but most European countries already have the highest taxes in the world. Thus, given these alternatives, a key issue for future healthcare in Europe is to find a way to provide high-quality services to a greater number of patients at a reasonable and socially acceptable cost. In healthcare a different kind of solution is reflected in the growing interest in, and practice of, increasing public participation in healthcare provision. More than a decade ago the World Health Organization (2005) maintained that there were basically three mechanisms for channeling public participation in healthcare governance: ‘choice’, ‘voice’ and ‘representation’. Choice mostly applies to individual decisions in selecting insurance providers and/or services. Voice tends to be exercised at the group or collective level to express public or group views. Representation implies a formal, regulated and often obligatory role in the process of healthcare governance. In the UK it was recently argued that public and patient engagement in healthcare is ‘an idea whose time has come’ (Hudson 2014), while the Office of Public Management states that ‘coproduction is the new paradigm for effective health and social care’ (Alakeson et al. 2013). Moreover, co-production can potentially combine choice, voice and representation, by actively engaging citizens in the provision of public services (Pestoff 2008, 2009). Peters (1996) states that mobilising and harnessing resources beyond the command and control of leaders in the public and private sectors becomes increasingly crucial for the sustainability of society and the achievement of both public and private goals. Citizens provide critical resources today, so we need to consider how best to mobilise and harness their resources, both in their role as professional service providers and users/citizens or co-producers of public services. Moreover, he argues that, in order to mobilise vast latent or currently unused resources in the public sector, a participatory administration model should focus on empowering the lower echelons of service providers and their clients, which would decentralise much of the decision-making to them. This

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should be reflected in the staff’s work environment, work satisfaction and how they perform their daily tasks. Before exploring the relationship between co-production, work environment and participative public governance, it is necessary to briefly define and delimit this endeavour. My understanding of co-production builds on the role played by citizens in the provision of public financed services, regardless of whether the provider is public, private, NGO/NPO or a social enterprise. It maintains a focus on service delivery and the role played by citizen/service users in providing such services and eventually in modifying them to better suit their needs and improve the service quality. Thus, it would adhere to the public administration, public management school of study, rather than service dominant or value chain approach of business administration (Pestoff 2018a). The empirical references for this understanding build on several studies of childcare and preschool services in Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s (Pestoff 1998, 2006, 2018a; Vamstad 2007), and more recently on research on co-production, governance, work environment and service quality in Japanese healthcare (Pestoff 2018b). In spite of differences in the periods, scale of service provision and the cultural context, there are nevertheless some striking similarities in the outcomes for the staff and service users. Governance and co-production are key for understanding the similarities and differences between them. Co-production is often noted by the mix of activities that both public service agents and citizens contribute to the provision of public services. The former are involved as professionals or ‘regular producers’, while ‘citizen production’ is based on voluntary efforts of individuals or groups to enhance the quality and/or quantity of services they receive (Parks et al. 1981; Brudney and England 1983; Ostrom 1996). In advanced societies there is a division of labour and most persons are engaged in full-time production of goods and services as regular producers. However, individual consumers or groups of consumers may also contribute to the production of goods and services, as consumer producers. This mixing may occur directly or indirectly. Ostrom states that all public goods and services are potentially produced by the regular producer and those who are frequently referred to as the ‘client’. However, she argues that ‘client’ is a passive term, indicating someone who is acted upon, or a passive recipient of services. ‘Co-production, by contrast, implies that citizens can play an active role in producing public goods and services of consequence to them’ (ibid., 347). This suggests that there may be a difference between ‘transformative co-production’, where citizens play an active role in producing public goods and services and ‘instrumental coproduction’ where they are passive service recipients, or their activities are limited to more mundane, sporadic acts contributing to the service delivery process.

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Previous Research on Work Environment Given the relational nature of many public services, including health and eldercare, social services, etc., our approach is premised on the assumption that work environment and service quality are closely related or linked to each other. An employee who has tossed and turned all night worrying about work-related problems, who feels tired and exhausted when they wake in the morning, who dreads the idea of going to work because they have little or no control or influence on the what, when, why, where and how of their daily routines, who has little chance to learn new things or advance at work, such an employee will not provide as good quality service as one who has the opposite experience and feeling about their work. Likewise, a client who experiences an unhappy, stressed or disgruntled service professional will not experience as good service quality as one being served by an employee with the opposite feelings. Similarly, an employee who feels threatened by greater client participation in the design and/or delivery of services will not be as open to co-production as one who recognises the benefits of such an arrangement. Karasek and Theorell (1990) note that work–life stress is related both to physical illness and lower productivity. They developed a two-dimensional demand/control model to understand, analyse and explain work environment and its physical and psychosocial impacts on workers and organisations. Combining these two dimensions results in a fourfold classification of jobs, where demands are expressed by the columns and control by the rows. Low demands combined with high control result in low-strain jobs, while low demands and low control lead to passive jobs. High demands combined with high control result in active jobs, but when control is low it produces highstrain jobs. The latter are usually considered most debilitating in work–life. They expand their model by adding a third dimension, ‘social support’ at work. It refers to overall levels of helpful social interaction available on the job from both co-workers and supervisors (ibid., 69). They note that social support appears to provide buffering mechanisms between psychological stressors at work and adverse health outcomes. Thus, social contacts and social structure affect the basic physiological processes important both to the maintenance of long-term health as well as the acquisition of new knowledge (Fig. 29.1).

Work-life demands and decision latitude or control High Low

Fig. 29.1

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Accordingly, they note that ‘… together, these three dimensions of work activity - demand, control and social support - are capable of predicting much of the range of total variation in depression symptoms in the US population’. Such symptoms increase in probability from 6 to 41%, given the right or wrong combination of these factors (ibid., 72). Later, a fourth work–life dimension concerning the nature and intensity of contacts with clients was proposed by Pestoff (1998). Similarly, Pfeffer’s latest book on human resource management and work– life, Dying for a Paycheck (2018), laments the fact that management practices can literally sicken 1,000,000s and kill 10,000s employees annually, yet they fail to improve organisational profitability or performance. He notes that ill health from workplace stress adversely affects productivity and drives up voluntary turnover that costs employers and society more than half a trillion dollars per year in the United States (ibid., 3). He argues that the physical work environment is closely regulated and inspected in most countries, but the psychosocial work environment usually isn’t. So, the costs of toxic workplaces result in social pollution that is passed on to various parts of the public health and welfare systems, not to mention individual employees in the form of ill health. The list of the ten most hazardous work–life stressors includes the lack of control at work, high work demands and receiving little social support at work (ibid., 39). Pfeffer emphasises the enormous toll of toxic workplaces and states that ‘the lack of job control is the single most important predictor for developing heart disease’ (ibid., 154). He concludes that ‘… all organizations have a choice: they can continue polluting work places and implementing management practices that create physical and mental ill-heath, literally kill people, and drive up healthcare costs in the process, or they can make different choices that result in the opposite outcomes’ (ibid., 211). Such choices are part and parcel of their corporate governance. Do their governance models only encompass the interests of a single stakeholder, the firm’s owners, or can they perhaps comprise several of them, including the workers, and even their clients?

Governance at the Macro, Meso and Micro Levels The concept of governance gained extensive attention about 25 years ago, and soon became a buzz word in social sciences. It is used in a wide array of contexts with widely divergent meanings. Van Kersbergen and van Waarden (2004) surveyed the literature and identified no fewer than nine different definitions of the concept; while Hirst (2002) attributes it five different meanings or contexts. He includes economic development, international institutions and regimes, corporate governance, private provision of public services in the wake of New Public Management, as well as new practices for coordinating activities through networks, partnerships and deliberative forums (ibid., 18–19), or New Public Governance. Hirst argued that the main reason for promoting

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greater governance is the growth of ‘organizational society’, noted as big organisations on either side of the public/private divide in advanced postindustrial societies that leave little room for democracy or citizen influence. This is due to the lack of local control and democratic processes for internal decision-making in most larger organisations, public or private. He argues, therefore, that the concept of governance points to the need to rethink democracy and find new methods of control and regulation that do not rely on the state or public sector having a monopoly of such practices (ibid., 21). Although governance is used in many different contexts, and employed differently at the macro, meso and micro levels, there are nevertheless some notable similarities between its usage at various levels. From a macro perspective, participatory governance is related to concepts like network governance, New Public Governance, co-governance and it concerns public policymaking. In a multilevel European context, it is seen as ‘a method or mechanism for dealing with a broad range of problems or conflicts in which actors regularly arrive at mutually satisfactory and binding decisions by negotiating with each other and cooperating in the implementation of these decisions’ (Schmitter 2002, 53). It is based on horizontal forms of interaction between actors who are sufficiently independent of each other so that neither can impose a solution on the other and yet sufficiently interdependent so that both would lose if no solution were found. Accordingly, participatory governance can emerge as an attractive second best solution, when there is ample market and/or state failure (ibid., 54). It implies flexible combinations of both public and private authority by representatives of those groups that will be affected by the policy adopted (ibid., 56). However, he notes that other roles than citizenship come into focus in participative governance, including those of stakeholders, shareholders, etc. At the meso level, interactive governance refers to jointly managed networks and/or collaborative governance, co-management, etc. Ostrom (1993) maintains that citizenship was confined for too long to voting and consumption of public services. She notes that limiting citizens either to being voters or clients constrains them to passive roles that leave them in the hands of others, rather than being something which they can control. The latter can only be achieved when citizens are attributed a more active role as co-producers of public services. Therefore, she proposes a more collaborative and functional governance model that emphasises a horizontal, two-way relationship among various participants in the community-local process, in contrast to the traditional hierarchical command and control model of public administration (ibid., 230). Edelenbos and van Meerkerk (2017) introduce three perspectives on interactive governance, particularly in a communitarian ‘Era of Big Society’. These comprise an instrumental perspective found in public administration literature, with a focus on effective governance and efficiency; a cultural perspective found in sociology and social psychology, with a focus on group dynamics and relationships; and a democratic perspective grounded in political science, with the objective of promoting legitimacy, democratic

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control and accountability in decision-making. However, they note that interactive governance is often subject to the ‘push and pull’ of processes between citizens and governments. This leads them to distinguish between two main forms of interactive governance, government-induced and citizen initiatives. The former is a top-down process that relies on ‘citizen participation’, but is strongly organised and constrained by governments, while the latter is based on bottom-up citizen initiatives and civic engagement that often stems from their dissatisfaction with government policy and action (ibid., 3). At the micro level, or governance at the point of service delivery, the concepts of multistakeholder and co-production are relevant. Governance at the micro level refers to systems and processes concerned with ensuring the overall direction, supervision and accountability of an organisation (Cornforth 2004). Spears et al. (2014) present six different models of corporate governance for non-profit organisations, including principle–agent theory, democratic theory, stakeholder theory, resource dependency theory and managerial hegemony theory (Spears et al. 2014). Both control and collaboration are essential elements of these theories. Accordingly, control helps to overcome human limitations through vigilance and discipline, while collaboration taps individuals’ aspirations via cooperation and empowerment. Yet, there is always a need to balance them (Sundaramurthy and Lewis 2003). Moreover, Sacchetti (2013, 16) argues that both governance and decisionmaking practices can be divided into inclusive and exclusive categories. Inclusive governance coordination structures embody awareness of the effects generated on specific stakeholders or ‘publics’ and on society more broadly, so they take into account both the outcomes and impacts of decisions on these ‘publics’. By extending impacts to encompass broader society, inclusive governance structures can activate resources from participating ‘publics’ and produce durable networks based on reciprocity and trust, as well as produce innovative outcomes. Governance can play an important role for developing new methods and models to improve work environment in enduring welfare services. For example, the three models employed for studying governance in Japanese healthcare are the command and control model, the stewardship model and the democratic, multistakeholder model (Pestoff 2018b). The command and control model is based on the Weberian ideal for public bureaucracy. The stewardship model assumes that managers want to do a good job and will act as effective stewards of an organisation’s resources, in collaboration with the main stakeholders. As a result, senior management and the stakeholders or members of an organisation are seen as partners. The role of the board is primarily strategic and board members are selected on the basis of their professional expertise, skills and contacts and they should receive proper training. By contrast, the democratic model includes ideas of open elections on the basis of ‘one member one vote’, pluralism, representation of different interests and accountability to its members. The board is often recruited from lay members

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Command & Control Low

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Fig. 29.2 Staff autonomy and stakeholder inclusiveness in three models of governance Source Pestoff (2020)

and its main function is to represent the diverse interests of the organisation’s members (Cornforth 2004). From a business administration perspective, governance models usually focus on the relationship between the board and top management of a third sector organisation or cooperative. However, employing a more holistic or encompassing approach, based on different academic perspectives, like political science, social work or sociology, would call for broadening the focus. The CEO and board do not provide the whole picture, so we intend to include other major stakeholders in our purview. The three models proposed here can be distinguished by the degree of autonomy given to the staff in terms of their everyday work–life and the degree of inclusiveness of various stakeholders in discussions and decision-making. Differences between them are visualised by the step-stool Fig. 29.2, where staff autonomy rises as we move from ‘command and control’ to ‘stewardship’ and the to ‘democratic, multi-stakeholder’ forms of governance. We will now turn our attention to the project on Co-production, Work Environment and Service Quality in Japanese Healthcare for an empirical base to explore these questions and models. It includes an Organisation Study, a Staff Study, a Patient Study and a Volunteer Study. Japan has a unique healthcare system with two user-owned cooperative healthcare providers (UN 1997). Together the Koseiren of Japanese Agriculture (JA) and the Health and Welfare Co-op Federation (HeW CO-OP) of the Japanese Consumer Co-op Union (JCCU) manage nearly 200 hospitals with almost 50,000 beds, which is more than the total number of hospital beds in Sweden and Denmark combined. Data for this project was collected by questionnaires to the staff at eight cooperative hospitals across Japan in 2016 and compared with similar data from the staff at two public hospitals in Osaka in 2017. The sample of the Staff Study from the 10 hospitals reached 6859, with a response rate of 72%. Data for the Patient Study was collected in 2017 by questionnaires to patients at four cooperative hospitals and resulted in 631 completed questionnaires.

Work Environment and Governance The Staff Study explored the contribution of governance to the work environment and service quality of public financed services. Based on the Karasek and Theorell ‘demand, control, support’ model we expected that more staff control over their daily work–life will promote greater work satisfaction and

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more satisfied staff that, in turn, will provide better quality services than dissatisfied staff. This project considered three potential models for governing the provision of public services: a democratic, multistakeholder model; a corporatist stewardship model and a more traditional command and control model. These models can be distinguished in terms of the autonomy given to the staff in their everyday work–life and the inclusion of users/citizens’ in discussions and decision-making pertaining to the provision of public services, as well as in their actual delivery. An inclusive governance model not only allows the staff more autonomy in resolving everyday work–life issues and problems, it can also promote a multi-stakeholder dialogue that facilitates greater user participation in the provision of their own care and social services. This can contribute to better service quality. Thus, governance can become an intervening factor of significant importance in facilitating a more satisfactory work environment and co-production. The Staff Study demonstrated that the Karasek and Theorell (1990) Demand/Control model of work environment (see Fig. 29.1) proved highly relevant for exploring the relationship between work environment and service quality in Japanese hospitals. We found a pattern where nearly one-third of the staff at these ten Japanese hospitals have low-strain jobs, one third high-strain jobs, while the remainder is divided between ‘passive’ and ‘active’ jobs. We documented the impact of these four work–life or job categories on the work environment indices employed by this study. They include Work Satisfaction, Social Support, Influence, Personal & Professional Development, Work–Life Balance, Networking and Service Quality. In particular, these work–life categories have a clear impact on service quality, where three out of five staff members with low-strain jobs claim high Service Quality, while only one of four staff with high-strain jobs make the same claim. Moreover, we found that Work Satisfaction was closely related to Service Quality. More than twothirds of the staff who were highly satisfied with their job said that Service Quality was high, while fewer than one-fourth of those who were least satisfied claimed high Service Quality. The Staff Study shows that work environment and service quality are positively related. Thus, a healthy work environment not only results in greater work satisfaction, but it promotes better service quality (Pestoff 2019a). Furthermore, we argued that governance systems can help explain some of the most notable differences in work environment, in particular, work satisfaction, and service quality. Governance systems can be viewed from various angles. A key perspective is the degree of autonomy given to staff and clients to interact and resolve certain issues by themselves related to service provision and service quality. Also the degree of inclusiveness of various stakeholders or ‘publics’ is important to consider. We noted that three governance models embody different levels of autonomy and inclusion in decision-making for both the staff and clients, illustrated in Fig. 29.2.

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The first step is a hierarchical command and control, top-down model that allows for little autonomy or discretion to the staff and restricts the influence of stakeholders outside the organisation, like patients. Traditional public services embody the hierarchical model. The middle step is a corporatist model based on a 70-year public–private partnership in Japanese healthcare that started at the end of World War II to provide healthcare to large groups residing well beyond the reach of the public services. Finally, multistakeholder organisations are found at the final step. They embody a bottom-up democratic model of governance that has existed and evolved in Japanese healthcare for nearly 80 years. It is worth noting that differences between these three steps or models do not simply involve the staff or the service users, but both groups together. To achieve the highest level of autonomy and become viable, both groups need to be present and actively involved. Finally, the Staff Study considered control and influence at Japanese hospitals in relation to governance models. Democratic multistakeholder models promoted greater staff control and influence than either the stewardship or command and control model. It also provided data about the frequency of contacts with three key stakeholder groups: patients, volunteers and the local community. It demonstrated that staff discussions with these stakeholders about hospital affairs are more inclusive at democratic multistakeholder hospitals than discussions at the other hospitals. The proportion with ‘high’ network answers ranges from 35.1% in a democratic governance model to only 16.2% in a command and control governance model. This suggests that governance models are an important contextual or intervening variable between work environment and service quality and can also promote patient participation and co-production.

Two Kinds of Co-production? There is a growing interest worldwide in finding ways to involve citizens in the provision of public services, particularly labour-intensive ones like social services and healthcare. Given the rapidly growing interest in this phenomenon, it comes as no surprise that there are several different definitions of co-production and more than one approach to studying it, or different schools of co-production (Pestoff 2018a). This section explores whether there is more than one type of co-production. It considers how hospitals can develop institutions that facilitate, foster and institutionalise patient participation? We also explored what role do patients’ needs and hospitals’ social values play in determining the type of co-production that develops? Unfortunately, data was not available for patients at the command and control hospitals, so we can only compare data from patients at the stewardship with those at a democratic, multistakeholder governed hospitals, or the Koseiren and Medical Co-op hospitals respectively.

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The analysis of data from the Patient Study reflects a model of patient needs, hospital structures and enhancing institutions that can promote patient participation and influence and their service satisfaction. A brief summary of the Patient Study shows that these two patient groups have different reasons for choosing their healthcare provider, one that closely reflects the hospital’s social values. Patients were either motivated by instrumental reasons or by values related to their membership in a health co-op. In general, we found that patients in Medical Co-ops participate more in community activities, more of them volunteer at their healthcare provider and in different types of activities. The Patient Study showed that Medical Co-op patients participated more actively in most types of hospital events. In particular, this includes making investments in their healthcare provider, via a membership contribution, participating in community activities, attending local membership meetings and volunteer activities. Moreover, as members of a health co-op, they can voice their opinion on important issues in several different ways. Not only can they talk directly with the professional staff or use the suggestion box, they can also participate in hospital committee meetings and ilocal meetings of the health co-op, etc. (Pestoff 2019b). Patients at the Medical Co-op also felt more capable of and willing to express their opinion about the hospital and its services than Koseiren patients. However, it also demonstrated that patients at both hospital groups were generally quite satisfied with the hospital’s staff and services, but Medical co-op patients were also somewhat more positive about two of the three items concerning hospital standards. Yet, nearly the same proportion of patients at both hospital groups, more than two-thirds of them, stated that they would recommend it to friends or acquaintances. The Patient Study suggests that being a patient in a Medical Co-op probably does not mean the same thing as being a patient at a Koseiren hospital. Patients at the Medical Co-ops are more than just patients, since they are members of a health co-op. This creates ties that bind and provides them with a feeling of ownership that gives them certain rights and responsibilities not shared by non-members. Thus, membership provides the social glue that enables and facilitates their working together for a common goal, i.e. the members’ health and well-being. Koseiren patients, by contrast, were indirect members via their affiliation with a local or regional branch of the agricultural federation, Japanese Agriculture, and, therefore, primarily hospital patients or clients. These comparisons of patient participation in Medical Co-ops and Koseiren healthcare provision demonstrated that there are different levels and different kinds of patient participation, particularly when patients are members in health co-ops rather than simply a patient or client at a hospital. However, these two different approaches to co-production not only express two different patterns of patient involvement in the provision of healthcare, but they also represent the differing needs of patients, and the differing values promoted by hospitals, reflecting their patients’ needs. In rural areas utilitarian or instrumental needs to alleviate local shortages in healthcare services

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and create qualified jobs locally are understandably much greater. Therefore, members of agricultural co-ops are satisfied with the traditional healthcare services provided by Koseiren. In urban areas, however, the need for more engagement and activity appears stronger, yet health co-op members appear equally satisfied with the services provided by the Medical Co-ops. The latter have the possibility of challenging traditional relationships of power, control and expertise in healthcare, rendering it the joint product of the activities of both patients and professional healthcare providers. This begs the question ‘What can hospitals do to encourage and facilitate patient participation?’ The Medical Co-ops promote the active participation of patients in a variety of ways and they have institutions that can facilitate and foster patient inclusion in the internal workings of their healthcare provider. By expecting patients to become a member of the health co-op, the Medical Co-ops are able to extend the rights and responsibilities of membership in a very different fashion than in Koseiren hospitals, which lack direct individual patient membership. Thus, membership in a health co-op provides a key to facilitating and fostering active patient co-production at the Medical Co-ops. Patients who are direct members in health co-ops have more positive attitudes about many aspects of the healthcare services and they are more active in the provision of their own healthcare. Thus, the Patient Study illustrates that there are two kinds of coproduction: aspirational and transformative. Aspirational co-production is limited to describing and recognising the potential benefits of co-production, paying lip service to it, and accepting the marginal or ad hoc contributions of citizens to public financed services. This can include finding ways to gradually increase the input of citizens to the provision of public services, in one fashion or another. However, in no way does it question or challenge the power asymmetry between the professional service providers and citizens. The primary purpose of aspirational co-production appears to be legitimisation. Transformative co-production, on the other hand, includes encouraging co-production by actively facilitating, fostering and institutionalising it. The primary purpose of transformative co-production is the democratisation of service provision. This leads to the conclusion that if a healthcare provider wants to embrace transformative co-production in the twenty-first century it must develop a proactive strategy for encouraging patients to participate actively in their healthcare co-op and a sustainable policy to facilitate and implement it. However, opening an organisation for transformative coproduction is a very long and complicated process; so, there is no quick fix (Fig. 29.3). In addition, health co-op members are encouraged to join Han study groups in order to bring their diet, exercise and lifestyle into balance, as part of their effort to promote preventive medicine. Moreover, members are recruited to join relevant hospital committees and many of them also are board members and/or hospital directors. Such opportunities both foster and institutionalise the role of members as co-producers of their own and others healthcare. These

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Fig. 29.3 Two kinds of co-production Source Pestoff (2019b)

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opportunities are not available to the patients at Koseiren hospitals. They do not have the rights and responsibilities of health co-op members, rather they are simply patients. Lacking the features of transformative co-production, they are part and parcel of Koseiren’s instrumental approach to co-production. Furthermore, given the hierarchical command and control model of governance found in public healthcare (Pestoff 2019a), co-production in public hospitals will most likely be limited to the instrumental variety. Nevertheless, these two different approaches to co-production might have something to learn from each other in terms of best practices, although this is more likely in a New Public Governance regime than a New Public Management one.

Bridging the Gap: Co-production and Governance on Both Sides of the Coin Karasek and Theorell (1990) note that work–life stress is related both to physical illness and lower productivity. They developed a two-dimensional demand/control model to understand, analyse and explain work environment and its physical and psychosocial impacts on workers and organisations. Combining these two dimensions results in a fourfold classification of jobs. Low demands combined with high control result in low-strain jobs; low demands and low control lead to passive jobs; high demands and high control result in active jobs; high demands and low control produce high-strain jobs, usually considered most debilitating in work–life. This chapter presented three different governance models and proposed arranging them in a step-stool fashion along the dimensions of staff autonomy and stakeholder inclusion—a hierarchical command and control, top-down model, typical of traditional public services, allows for little autonomy or discretion to either staff or clients, while, on the top step, multistakeholder organisations represent the highest level of autonomy, embodying a bottomup democratic model of governance that exist in some non-governmental organisations, co-operatives and social enterprises. It is worth noting that differences between these three steps or models do not simply involve staff or service users, but both groups together. To achieve the highest level of autonomy and become viable they both need to be present and actively involved. It follows from this configuration that governance models can make an impact on the work environment, work satisfaction and service quality.

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Research shows that staff with greater autonomy were more satisfied than those with less autonomy (Pestoff 2018b). This, in turn, can have a positive or negative impact on perceived service quality. It suggests that governance models are an important intervening variable between work environment and service quality. Thus, governance models, rather than ownership of the service provider per se, appear to require closer attention in research on co-production, work environment and service quality in healthcare and other public financed services. However, different ownership constellations might learn from the best practices found in these separate governance models. The Patient Study addressed issues related to the importance of membership. Does being a patient in a Medical Co-op mean the same thing as being a patient at a Koseiren hospital? Patients at the Medical Co-ops are more than just patients, they are also members of their healthcare co-op. Being a member creates ties that bind, and it also provides them with a feeling of ownership that gives them certain rights and responsibilities not shared by non-members. Thus, membership provides the social glue that enables and facilitates their working together for a common goal, i.e. the members’ health and well-being. As noted earlier we feel that it is necessary to consider both sides of the coin in order to understand the role of participative public governance (Peters 1996), i.e. both the staff and users/citizens. Exploring the impact of governance on the condition and well-being of staff alone is insufficient. Similarly, only focusing on the role of users/citizens in co-production is also insufficient. Either approach only provides half of the story at best. Only by studying the impact of different governance models on both the main actors in co-production, the staff and users/citizens, can we begin to understand the importance of governance models for promoting participative public governance.

References Alakeson, V., A. Bunnin, & C. Miller (2013). Coproduction of Health and Wellbeing Outcomes: The New Paradigm for Effective Health and Social Care; London: Office of Public Management. Brudney, J. & R. England (1983). Towards a Definition of the Coproduction Concept; Public Administration Review, 43: 59–65. Cornforth, C. (2004). The Governance of Co-operatives and Mutual Associations: A Paradox Perspective; Annals of Public and Co-operative Economics, 75/1: 11–32. Edelenbos, J. & I. van Meerkerk (2017). Introduction: Three Reflective Perspectives on Interactive Governance; Critical Reflections on Interactive Governance; Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Hirst, P. (2002). Democracy & Governance, in Debating Governance, Authority, Steering and Democracy; J. Pierre (ed.); Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hudson, B. (2014). Public and Patient Engagement in Commissioning in the English NHS: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?; Public Management Review, 17/1: 1–16. Karasek, R. & T. Theorell (1990). Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity and the Reconstruction of Working Life; New York: Basic Books.

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Osborne, S.P., Z. Radnor, & G. Nasi (2013). A New Theory for Public Sector Management? Towards a (Public) Service Dominant Approach; American Review of Public Administration, 43/2: 135–158. Ostrom, E. (1993). A Communitarian Approach to Local Governance; National Civic Review, 82/3: 226–233. Ostrom, E. (1996 [1999]). Crossing the Great Divide: Coproduction, Synergy, and Development; World Development, 24/6: 1073–1087 and reprinted in 1999 as Ch. 15, in Polycentric Governance and Development: Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis; Michael D. McGinnis (ed.); Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press. Parks, R.B., P.C. Baker, L. Kiser, R. Oakerson, E. Ostrom, V. Ostrom, S.L. Perry, M.B. Vandivort, & G.P. Whitaker (eds) (1981 [1999]). Consumers as Co-Producers of Public Services: Some Economic and Institutional Considerations; Policy Studies Journal, v. 9: 1001–1011, reprinted in 1999 as Ch. 17 in Local Public Economies: Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis; Michael D. McGinnis (ed.); Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press. Pestoff, V. (1998). Beyond the Market and State: Social Enterprise and Civil Democracy in a Welfare Society; Aldershot, UK: Brookfield, USA. Pestoff, V. (2006). Citizens and Co-production of Welfare Services: Childcare in Eight European Countries; Public Management Review, 8/4: 503–520. Pestoff, V. (2008). A Democratic Architecture for the Welfare State; London & New York: Routledge. Pestoff, V. (2009). Towards a Paradigm of Democratic Governance: Citizen Participation and Co-Production of Personal Social Services in Sweden; Annals of Public and Cooperative Economy, 80/2: 197–224. Pestoff, V. (2018a). Co-production and Public Service Management: Citizenship, Governance and Public Service Management; London & New York: Routledge. Pestoff, V. (2018b). Work Environment and Service Quality in Japanese Healthcare; Osaka, Japan: Paper Presented to the ICSEA Conference. Pestoff, V. (2019a). Work Environment, Governance and Service Quality in Japanese Healthcare; San Diego: ARNOVA Conference Paper. Pestoff, V. (2019b). Two Patterns of Patient Participation in Japanese Healthcare— Instrumental and Transformative Co-production? Copenhagen: Conference Paper. Peters, G. (1996). The Future of Governing: Four Emerging Models; Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Pfeffer, J. (2018). Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employees Health and Company Performance—And What We Can Do About It; New York, NY: Harper-Collins Publishers. Sacchetti, S. (2013). Inclusive and Exclusive Social Preferences: A Deweyan Framework to Explain Governance Heterogeneity; Journal of Business Ethics. http://doi. org/10.1007/s10551-013-1971-0. Schmitter, P. (2002). Participation in Governance Arrangements: Is There Any Reason to Expect It Will Achieve “Sustainable and Innovative Policies in a Multi-Level Context”, in Participatory Governance: Political and Societal Implications; Jurgen R. Grote & Bernard Gbikpi (eds); Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Spears, R., C. Cornforth, & M. Aiken (2014). Major Perspectives on Governance of Social Enterprise; Ch. 7 in Social Enterprise and the Third Sector; J. Defourny, L. Hulgård, & V. Pestoff (eds); London & New York: Routledge.

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Sundaramurthy, C. & M. Lewis (2003). Control and Collaboration: Paradoxes of Governance; Academy of Management Review, 28/3: 397–415. United Nations (1997). Co-operative Enterprise in the Health and Social Care Sectors; New York: United Nations. Vamstad, J. (2007). Governing Welfare: The Third Sector and the Challenges to the Swedish Welfare State; Östersund: Mid-Sweden University, Ph.D. Thesis, No. 37. Van Kersbergen, K. & F. van Waarden (2004). Governance as a Bridge between Disciplines; European Journal of Political Research, 5/3: 227–243. World Health Organization (2005). Ninth Futures Forum on Health Systems Governance and Public Participation; Copenhagen: WHO.

CHAPTER 30

ICT-Based Co-production: A Public Values Perspective Wouter Nieuwenhuizen and Albert Meijer

Introduction In recent decades, attention has been drawn to the changing relationship between state and its citizens. Co-production fundamentally alters the relationship between government and its citizens (Bovaird 2007; Alford 2009), leading to a structural transformation of the public sector (Meijer 2016). A defining question for the delivery of public services is no longer ‘government or not’ (Linders 2012, 451), but rather how responsibilities between government, citizens and other stakeholders should be shared (Linders 2012). It is clear that advancements in ICTs and social media shape the way public services are delivered. In an era in which government rows rather than steers (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), co-production through digital technologies poses great potential for government to reshape their role. Co-production has the potential to significantly transform public services, not only for citizens but also for professionals and the systems they work in (Boyle and Harris 2009). In its key form, co-production embodies new forms of communication between citizens and government (Meijer 2012). In these new forms of communication, digital technologies play an increasingly important role by potentially reducing the transaction costs of communication (Meijer 2014) and enabling more citizens to participate (Meijer 2012).

W. Nieuwenhuizen · A. Meijer (B) Utrecht University School of Governance, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

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The promise of co-production is often seen in research as one of increased legitimacy, more efficiency and effectiveness of government and of more accountability (Verschuere et al. 2012). At the same time, academic research highlights that these promises may not be realised and co-production may actually produce risks rather than promises (Calabro 2012; Brandsen et al. 2018). The promises and risks are argued to be highly dependent on patterns of implementation in different contexts. ICT-based co-production can influence co-production in traditional instrumental ways, by merely facilitating an information-sharing practice, in transformative ways that were not possible before, such as ‘co-creation through imagination’ via the use of augmented reality (Forlano 2013) or in substitutive ways, replacing traditional coproduction processes altogether (Lember 2018). In cases of substitution, the role of citizens is reduced from active to passive. This chapter explores all three types of ICT-based co-production and combines them with public values theory to shed light on different promises and risks. Previous overarching studies on ICT-based co-production (i.e. Lember 2018; Linders 2012; Lember et al. 2019) provide important insights but have not been able to take explicitly into account all different public values for which ICT-based co-production can be a promise or a risk. Some public values seem to be looked into more than others, such as efficiency, effectiveness and equality (Lember 2018). A recent study by Lember et al. (2019) provides a substantive analysis of potential impacts of different types of technology on co-production but they do not explicitly evaluate impacts in terms of public values. We think it is important to address this shortcoming in previous research because ICT-based co-production has the potential to significantly alter the relationship between government and citizen (Meijer 2016). This study aims to examine the promises and risks that ICT-based coproduction has in light of different public values. We employ a public values perspective based on De Graaf et al. (2016) to map the promises and risks of ICT-based co-production. The following research question is answered in this chapter: how do different types of ICT -based co-production pose a risk or a promise to the realisation of public values? In order to answer this question, we first examine what co-production entails and what type of goals it commonly has. Second, we assess the different roles that digital technologies have in processes of co-production. Third, we look at which public values are at risk or can benefit from ICT-based coproduction. After this, the promises and risks of ICT-based co-production are analysed in light of different public values. We conclude by answering our research question in the last section.

ICT-Based Co-production Research on co-production has a long history, spanning different academic disciplines such as sociology, voluntary sector research and public management (Verschuere et al. 2012). In this paper, we use the following recent definition

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of co-production as posed by Brandsen and Honingh (2016, 431), because it clearly defines the relationship between professionals and citizens, yet also leaves open the kind of contribution and work of the organisation it concerns: ‘Co-production is a relationship between a paid employee of an organization and (groups of) individual citizens that requires a direct and active contribution from these citizens to the work of the organization’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 431). The scope of co-production is often debated in literature (see, for example, Torfing et al. 2019). We follow Brandsen and Honingh (2018, 14) in conceptualising co-production as co-design and co-delivery: the design and/or implementation of a public service. This is different from co-creation, which is more concerned with the planning of a public service and therefore more similar to forms of citizen participation in which citizens help shape policies. In traditional public administration, also labelled ‘old public administration’ by Osborne (2006), citizens are not seen as co-producers of public service delivery but rather as passive clients (Pestoff 2012). Citizens had a ‘social contract’ with the state, giving up a part of their freedom in exchange for protection (Meijer 2016). Public organisations were more concerned with legality and equity of service delivery. Since the rise of NPM, citizens are seen as more important stakeholders. Citizens had to become active customers and citizen satisfaction became a driver for the performance of public service delivery (Pestoff 2012). In the past two decades more attention is being put on the role of citizens as active co-producers of services, rather than passive contributors (Bovaird 2007). The paradigm of New Public Governance (NPG) highlights that ‘multiple interdependent actors contribute to the delivery of public services’ (Osborne 2006, 384). Professionals are not the only ones delivering public services, but citizens are co-producing them (Verschuere et al. 2012). Although co-production can be initiated by citizens, it is often initiated by government to pursue actively certain goals and to improve services. When digital technologies are involved this is even more the case, because resources are often needed to account for a digital infrastructure (Clifton et al. 2019). Co-production can lead to services that better connect to needs of users. In co-production research there is often little attention to the question of why we can expect better service delivery from co-production, but insights from innovation science applied to our field show that a diverse set of people might foster service delivery. Users take an outside perspective to an organisation, product or idea (Lettl et al. 2006). When users have high motivation and possess a set of different competencies, they can contribute significantly to innovation, for example in developing software, medical equipment and information systems (Lettl et al. 2006). Thus, users bring a different set of values and skills to the table which might enhance the quality of a service or product. This discussion highlights that co-production offers great potential to strengthen public services by bringing in the skills, competences and efforts of users. At the same time, organising this interface between service providers

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and service users is challenging in view of the variety and dispersion of the users. To facilitate these interactions, ICTs can possibly play an important role.

Instrumental, Transformative and Substitutive Roles of ICTs The emergence of new digital technologies has led to increased interest in co-production. Proponents of co-production see new technologies such as the internet as a potential driver for the co-production of public services and rearrangement of relations between government and citizens (Tapscott and Williams 2006). Moon (2018), for example claims that the role of citizens in co-producing public services has become easier to fulfil due to digital technologies. Clark et al. (2013) show that digital technologies can both cause and tackle inequalities in the co-production of public services. Empirical research on the role of digital technologies in co-production has previously focused on, among others, new media (Meijer 2012; Linders 2012), smart cities (Webster and Leleux 2018) and e-government (Fugini and Teimourikia 2016). Still, empirical evidence for the potential impact of digital technologies on co-production is lacking (Lember et al. 2019). Following structuration theory (Giddens 1984), the use of digital technologies in co-production has to be studied as processes of institutional change. When a municipality introduces an app for their citizens to co-produce a service with them, the characteristics of the app are not leading. What is most important is how citizens interact with the app in a specific context. Specific characteristics of digital technologies can be seen as affordances: ‘An affordance refers to the fact that the physical properties of an object make possible different functions for the person perceiving or using that object’ (Sellen and Harper 2002). Taking the example of apps, affordances could be that apps are place-independent, inexpensive and interactive. These affordances do not determine outcomes; however, they get meaning in interaction with citizens and thereafter lead to different outcomes. The perspective of structuration—and affordances theory is valuable in two ways. First, digital technologies, although now treated conceptually as the same, differ in affordances. Blockchain possesses affordances that are interacted with in very different ways from social media. When we thus look at the risks and promises that ICT-based co-production has on different public values, affordances of digital technologies do not determine the fostering or neglect of a certain public value, but can be promising or risky nonetheless, depending on the interaction between structure (technology) and agency (coproducers). Second, the perspective of structuration—and affordances theory counterbalances the techno-optimism that is prevalent in research on ICTbased co-production. The promises of digital technologies for co-production are often exaggerated, while the risks are neglected or under-represented (Lember et al. 2019).

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The influence of digital technologies on co-production can either be instrumental, transformative or substitutive, as described by Lember (2018). Lember (2018) refers to the instrumental usage of digital technologies for coproduction as ‘indirect’; however we find that ‘instrumental’ fits better with the ‘means to an end’ nature of the relationship. Following Castells (1996) we see digital technology as a socially embedded process, not an outside factor influencing society, that can however be a significant driver to all kinds of changes within the way co-production is practiced. Digital technologies are not determined to be disruptive for co-production, they can also be a mere reproduction of the status quo in an instrumental way and thus potentially neutral in terms of public value. How instrumental, transformative or substitutive digital technologies will become, and which public values will be thriving or at stake, depends on the ongoing interaction and re-negotiation of the social contract between state and citizens. When digital technologies are instrumental to co-production, they are only a way to assist government in delivering public services in a way they already used to do. When digital technologies are transformative to co-production, they support practices that were not possible before. Finally, digital technologies can substitute traditional co-production processes by replacing certain elements, rendering either state or citizens passive instead of active. This typology is useful to categorise the different types of influence that digital technologies have. The next step in our argument is to present a public values perspective of different categories of good governance (proper, performing and responsive governance) to assess the promises and risks of these three types of ICT-based co-production. Section “Public Values: Performing, Responsive and Proper Governance” describes the public values perspective and in sect. “Instrumental ICT-Based Co-production” we will use these conceptualisations of ICT-based co-production and public values to analyse the promises and risks on the basis of the limited number of studies on this topic.

Public Values: Performing, Responsive and Proper Governance Public values are ‘the important qualities of public governance’ (De Graaf et al. 2016, 1103). They specify ‘the rights, benefits and prerogatives to which citizens should (and should not) be entitled, the obligations of citizens to society, the state and one another; and the principles on which governments and policies should be based’ (Bozeman 2007, 13). These values can be seen as the building blocks of the public sector (Beck Jørgensen 1999, 581). Public values, as we use the term here, have a process focus, concerned with ‘doing’ governance and not with value creation as described by Mark Moore (Van der Wal et al. 2015). Good governance is directional and guiding, providing public actors with ideas about what should be done and what values should be strived for in governance.

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De Graaf et al. (2016) have analysed a broad set of values and categorised them in three clusters: performing governance (i.e. efficiency and effectiveness), responsive governance (i.e. accountability and participation) (De Graaf et al. 2016) and proper governance, concerned with integrity, equality and lawfulness. The categorisation we use is based on empirical research in the Netherlands by De Graaf et al. (2016). However they found many similarities with ‘global public values’ distinguished by Beck Jørgensen and Sørensen (2012). Each category contains several public values and not exhaustive—one could, for example, include values such as openness or political loyalty, which are present in the set of ‘global public values’ by Beck Jørgensen and Sørensen (2012), but not as present in the Dutch sector (De Graaf et al. 2016). At the same time, the overview provided by De Graaf et al. (2016) is more systematic than the other overviews and provides us with an analytical framework to examine the potential influence of ICT-based co-production on different types of public values. Several overview studies (i.e. Lember 2018; Lember et al. 2019; Linders 2012) have only partly looked into the effect of ICT-based co-production on public values, mainly focusing on effectiveness, efficiency and participation (Lember 2018), the already mentioned common goals of co-production. Affordances of different types of digital technologies are not determining by themselves to threaten or enhance public values, because affordances are always interacted with. That is why we look at different roles that digital technologies can have in co-production processes and not at digital technologies themselves as solidified artefacts. An overview of the clusters of public values is presented in Table 30.1. We will use this overview to analyse instrumental, transformative and substitutive ICT-based co-production. There are two main reasons why this evaluation adds to existing literature. First, because proper governance is often neglected thus far, and second, because this evaluation is more holistic in nature than other more dispersed mentions of public values in previously undertaken studies. Table 30.1 Categorisation of public values

Proper governance

Performing governance

Responsive governance

Integrity Equality Lawfulness

Effectiveness Efficiency

Participation Legitimacy Transparency Accountability

Source Based on De Graaf et al. (2016)

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Instrumental ICT-Based Co-production Government can use digital technologies in an instrumental way by merely using them to assist them in delivering services ‘the way they used to’ through co-production. Digital technologies can help to deliver information throughout classical co-production processes (Lember 2018) or can serve as means to make real-time insights possible for citizens, nudging them into action (Linders 2012). This instrumental use of digital technologies can be summarised as ‘doing the same, but with different means’. Nothing significantly changes about the nature of co-production when digital technologies are used instrumentally, but they serve as a means to an end in an otherwise mostly traditional co-production process, overcoming ‘geographical, temporal and organisational barriers’ (Lember et al. 2019). An example of a digital technology that can be instrumental for coproduction is social media. Mergel (2016) argues that social media usage in government has not led to transformative usage of digital technologies but has rather served as a replacement for traditional ways of transmitting information. When social media are used in co-production processes, it thus does not have to be transformative by nature, although it can be, depending on the transformative nature of social media. Instrumental Role and Proper Governance Proper governance, concerned with lawfulness, equality and integrity is not usually a goal of co-production (Voorberg et al. 2015). Although it is easy to ‘applaud specific values, […] it is much harder to subsequently act in line with all of them’ (De Graaf et al. 2016, 1102). While proper governance should always be strived after as a prerequisite in co-production processes, it can be snowed under by other forms of governance when it is not seen as an explicit goal of co-production. When digital technologies are used in an instrumental way to co-produce, be it by citizens or by government, they do not pose a risk of a promise in itself. It highly depends on the nature of the co-production practice and the ICT usage, as digital technologies are only a means in this case. In a co-production study in Sweden, digital technologies were found to provide the same opportunities for all participating actors, lowering ‘inequalities with regard to availability and accessibility of information access’ (Uppström and Lönn 2017, 414). Still, end-users reported that the technology was difficult to use for ICT-illiterate people, thus only helping to provide the same opportunities for all actors that were able to participate. On the other hand, there can be a public values conflict between equality and effectiveness in terms of reaching citizens in co-production processes. Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer (2015) state that using social media for interaction between citizens and government can be effective for engaging with

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citizens who are clearly interested and engaged. While this might be good for performing governance, it can affect proper governance in a negative way. When human-centred interaction is completely eliminated from coproduction processes, this can lead to negative effects in terms of proper governance, because equality may suffer, if digitalised co-production disadvantages ICT-illiterate citizens. We see the role of instrumental ICT-based co-production as neutral, because (1) instrumental usage of digital technologies means that the goal of co-production matters more than the affordance of the technologies itself and (2) public value conflicts for proper governance therefore most likely stem from the goal of co-production processes instead of the technology used. Instrumental Role and Performing Governance The value of instrumental usage of digital technologies in co-production should not be underestimated. While getting citizens together used to be a labour-intensive process for government, the internet has made it way easier to target people in co-production processes (Lember 2018). This reduction of transaction costs contributes to the public value of efficiency and when more people are able to be reached it can also foster effectiveness of public services. Instrumental usage of digital technologies can therefore contribute to towards performing governance. Research on platform government shows that combining resources between state and citizens can be a way to practice more efficient and effective governance (Linders 2012). An example is the usage of the internet to let people co-produce clean streets by reporting issues in the public space (Linders 2012). It does lead to gains in efficiency and effectiveness compared to calling government, but it will not alter government–citizen relationships in significant ways. This instrumental usage of digital technologies in co-production leads to incremental improvements of public service delivery. Instrumental Role and Responsive Governance Responsive governance means to strive for participation, legitimacy, transparency and accountability (De Graaf et al. 2016). Governments that use digital technologies in an instrumental way can thereby improve participation and legitimacy if they reach a wider audience than was possible before (quantity) or if they are able to deliver a qualitatively better co-production experience for citizens. It can also make the process of co-production more transparent. For example, when a call for co-production is published publicly online, its efforts are available to the general public indefinitely, rather than efforts of reaching citizens by post or other traditional means. Empirical research by Meijer (2012, 1162) on public service support, which entails ‘helping clients in the process of public service provision’, shows that the internet can create more openness by letting citizens share experiences

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about public services with each other. Meijer (2012) examined a governmentinitiated forum that enabled citizens to get public service support from other citizens. This forum was used in an instrumental way by providing an extra channel of information to citizens. It also fostered the public value of accountability by giving citizens a way to directly engage with public servants and talk to them about the public services that they delivered. All together we see instrumental usage of digital technologies as promising for responsive governance.

Transformative ICT-Based Co-production Digital technologies can also transform the way governments and citizens co-produce (Lember 2018). New forms of co-production can emerge that were not possible before, such as technologies in healthcare that centre the patient as a co-producer of its medical care (Wherton et al. 2015). Usercentred design falls into this transforming category. Using methods such as design thinking, governments can actively develop new public services via use of digital technologies (Bason 2018). In different sectors this transformative nature of digital technologies has already significantly reshaped the way government and citizens co-produce. Meijer (2012) describes how in the case of security, citizens become a coproducer of public safety by participating in digital networks to help the police solve crime. That is the transformative nature of co-production at work. A digital platform is not just a means to an end for the police to solve more crime, it alters the interaction between state and citizens by making citizens actively involved in tasks previously only associated with police (i.e. neighbourhood surveillance) (Meijer 2012). Transformative Role and Proper Governance For proper governance, transformative use of digital technologies in production can pose risks. The role of the state as independent actor with professional and tacit knowledge about drafting policy and providing public services can change when technologies empower citizens to be a part of these processes. Challenging this state role does not necessarily have to be bad, as it can be very promising in terms of responsive governance. But a public value conflict is certainly present here. Public professionals have a certain degree of professionalism and integrity that helps them balance between different public values (De Graaf et al. 2016) but citizens do not have this professional ‘obligation’. When asked to participate in the creation of a new neighbourhood vision, using augmented reality to visualise and alter how one’s neighbourhood will look in the future, citizens will think more of their own values than public ones. This may pose a risk for lawfulness, not in terms of disobeying the law, but more in terms of

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the mandate for the co-producing citizens: what power do co-producing citizens (horizontal democracy) possess to decide on a neighbourhood vision in contrast to elected officials (vertical democracy) (De Graaf et al. 2016)? Equality is a concern for co-production in general, but is more often coined as a concern in relation to digitally illiterate citizens and certain demographic groups. Clark et al. (2013) and Alford and Yates (2016) demonstrate that digital technologies do not necessarily pose a risk for equality and can even improve it by including people that were previously excluded. A field experiment by Jakobsen (2013) shows how government-initiated co-production without ICT can improve equality, but more empirical evidence is necessary to fully claim a beneficial effect of specifically ICT -based co-production on equality. This is even more so because broader research on ICT usage in the public sector does suggest negative impacts for democratic values such as equality (Adams and Prins 2017). The transformative nature of digital technologies naturally makes it potentially risky for proper governance, even more so because it can be very promising for both performing and responsive governance. This makes it more likely for a potential trade-off between proper governance and the other two forms of governance to end up being negative for proper governance. An emphasis on value-sensitive design (Friedman et al. 2008) may reduce the risks to proper governance but in current approaches there is still a strong focus on ‘making things work’ rather than ensuring that they work properly. Transformative Role and Performing Governance For effectiveness and efficiency of governance, a transforming role of digital technologies in co-production can be highly promising. Making patients coproducers of their own care both makes care more effective, because care can be on demand and more personal, and also more efficient, by partly eliminating the need for professional caretakers (Wherton et al. 2015). For solving crime, ‘more eyes see more’, making every digitally co-producing citizen an extra means through which crime can be spotted, increasing both efficiency and effectiveness of policing. Meijer (2012) showed that digital technologies, in this case new media, can enhance police effectiveness and efficiency by creating new connections between citizens and government. Co-production through a digital network of citizens and police officers led to 50% of cases being solved through coproduction practices. Overall, for performing governance, we see a promise for transformative digital technologies in co-production practices. Transformative Role and Responsive Governance For responsive governance, a transforming role of digital technologies in coproduction is promising because it can cause a government to take on a more responsive role in society. Online platforms allow government and citizens to

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interact more and more deeply than they could have before (Linders 2012). The co-production of open data can potentially lead to more transparent solutions to societal problems and accountability for government actions, if the co-production process is designed well (Ruijer et al. 2017). Research on ICT-based co-production in healthcare shows that when technology is used not to substitute for human interaction, but for increased human interaction by bringing people together and empowering them, it can fundamentally transform the way citizens and professionals co-produce (Cottam 2018). In this case, digital technologies made room for more physical relationships instead of trying to replace them, thereby leading to an increased motivation to co-produce and empowerment of citizens. In our earlier example of ICT-based co-production for safety, police chose to stay in control by only allowing government–citizen interactions and no citizen–citizen interactions, therefore also contributing to the legitimacy of police work (Meijer 2012). In substitutive usage of digital technologies for coproduction, we see that this legitimacy can be at stake, but here government chose very deliberately to stay in control, in the end, over the domain of safety. However, responsiveness does not come automatically with this transforming role. Cottam (2018) shows that digital technologies can also be used to ‘upscale’ existing practices of massive welfare provision without human interaction, transforming street level bureaucrats into so-called screen-level bureaucrats (Bovens and Zouridis 2002). This suggests that government must take public values of responsive governance into active consideration when using transformative digital technologies in co-production.

Substitutive ICT-Based Co-production When digital technologies substitute co-production, it essentially means that traditional service delivery models are replaced with self-organisation (Lember 2018)—either self-organisation by technology or self-organisation by citizens. Artificial intelligence opens doors to service delivery that is done without any human (be it professional or citizen) interference. Self-organisation by technology entails, among other things, automated decision-making (for discussion on its legality under GDPR, see Wachter et al. 2017) and predictive policing (Meijer and Wessels 2019). Citizens are still co-producing the public service of healthcare when they are connected 24/7 by remote healthmonitoring sensors, but their role in the process is passive rather than active (Lember 2018). These are examples of how digital technologies make available new approaches to service delivery that may substitute co-production altogether. In any event where human actors still play a role in the decision-making process together with technology, the impact of substitutive ICT-based coproduction may be more limited. A recent study on the interaction between big data analysts and decision makers showed that big data did not necessarily have a big impact on how decision makers legitimised their decisions (Van der

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Voort et al. 2019). This leaves room for interaction between co-production practices and digital technology, as long as technology does not substitute for co-production altogether. On the other hand, self-organisation by citizens through digital technologies is another potential way to substitute co-production (Lember 2018). Grassroot citizen initiatives can cater to a much larger audience due to digital technologies, delivering (public) services to users without the need for a government middleman (Pazaitis et al. 2017). This ‘open cooperativism’ can thus substitute co-production by eliminating the state as an actor altogether. Substitutive Role and Proper Governance What to think of substituting co-production depends on the goal of substitution. If the goal of removing government–citizen interaction is not in line with values of integrity and lawfulness, but rather because of performance values, it can pose a threat to proper governance. Automated decision-making is not beneficial for participation by its nature, but traditional decision-making done by street level bureaucrats can similarly neglect participation by citizens. Substitutive technologies such as automated decision-making can contribute to integrity of governance if they can erase potential human biases and error, which can actually strengthen proper governance (EPFL IRGC 2018), especially when stakes are high, such as in child welfare (Cuccaro-Alamin et al. 2017). Digital technologies can also introduce new biases on their own—see O’Neil (2016) for a discussion on risks of biases present in artificial intelligence. When co-production is substituted by digital technologies used by citizens, we have to acknowledge the inherent responsibility of those citizens for the effects of digital technologies. Technology can ‘follow its own logic’, making users of technologies responsible for the protection of certain values that depend on the interaction with affordances of those technologies (Adams and Prins 2017). This might be a risk, because citizens are not always equipped to oversee the effect that digital technologies have on proper governance, because this safeguarding is traditionally a responsibility of government. In the case that citizens use digital technologies to substitute traditional co-production processes, government should make them aware of the importance of proper governance. It might however prove to be difficult to put in place such safeguarding mechanisms, precisely because of the absence of government in these processes. Overall, the potential risks for proper governance are greater than the potential benefits because the state, as the actor responsible for proper governance, is mostly eliminated when co-production is substituted. Still, it can take steps to keep potential risks of proper governance within limits, but its potential influence can be less than when digital technologies are used in an instrumental or transformative way and it has the initiative.

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Technology can automate co-production practices, rendering human involvement obsolete, or can be used by citizens during co-production, without the state being present, therefore potentially threatening values of proper governance. Substitutive Role and Performing Governance It can be very effective to substitute co-production by means of digital technologies, because resources can be saved when less human involvement is necessary and using artificial intelligence for automated decision-making is often done for effectiveness and efficiency (Cuccaro-Alamin et al. 2017). However, in these circumstances, government is also less able to exert influence to make sure a service is delivered effectively. When citizens take all responsibility for designing and executing a certain service it might be highly effective, but government does lose control over it. Some examples of this in the literature are labelled as ‘user-led service design’ (O’Rourke 2013, Vackerberg 2013), but consist of situations in which government initiates a process and thereafter collaborates with citizens. More empirical research is therefore needed into cases where citizens take all responsibility for designing and executing a service, even more so where digital technologies are used. Initial transformative use of digital technologies in co-production can also become substitutive, such as when tele-health is used for austerity reasons to remove all citizen-professional interaction, increasing efficiency by removing the relationship between state and citizen altogether. When this happens, ultimately co-production gets replaced by self-organisation in civil society without government playing a key role. Substitutive Role and Responsive Governance It can be the role of government itself that is substituted in certain public services (Lember 2018). This can cause accountability to shift in nontransparent ways. Citizens that use digital technologies to self-organise a service without government involvement are not accountable in the same way as democratically mandated governmental institutions are. Legitimacy for the production of a service then becomes unclear as well; do citizens have the same legitimacy as government does? Responsive governance can therefore be at stake because it will be unclear who remains accountable and what legitimacy exists for such a public service. As argued earlier, government could play a role in making citizens aware of the importance of certain public values that could be at stake when using digital technologies to substitute traditional co-production processes. Furthermore, citizens expect from a responsive government that it is actively involved in society. This expectation, however, creates a dilemma in the face of new forms of co-production. When digital technologies substitute coproduction, the relationship between government and citizen has the potential

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to disappear completely (i.e. in automated decision making, or in citizen-only initiatives). This raises the question of how to design a quite different role for government, which respects the citizens’ capacity to do much more than before but also respects government’s duty to ensure ‘proper governance’.

Conclusion Digital technologies make for limitless new possibilities to co-produce public services. Since co-production by its nature does not lead to stability and predictiveness, something that traditional public service delivery is often seen as being good at, we need to understand even better what digital technologies really mean for the realm of co-production. We provided a part of this understanding by employing a public values perspective and looking at the promises and risks that are posed for proper, performing and responsive governance. This shows that public value conflicts are central whenever co-production takes place. Do we make a service more efficient by giving citizens more responsibilities, therefore partly neglecting lawfulness and integrity? It is those types of value-conflict driven questions that governments nowadays have to deal with and that future research on digitally facilitated co-production should focus on. The results of our analysis are presented in Table 30.2. From our analysis we can draw three main conclusions. First, it shows that proper governance is at risk under two out of three types of ICT-based coproduction, while one has a neutral effect. Second, we find that risks for public value increase when the influence of digital technologies on co-production increases. The more potentially determining technology is for co-production processes, the more potentially negative its outcome is for, particularly, proper and responsive governance. Third, we see that ICT-based co-production is promising in every form for performing governance. These conclusions highlight why the introduction of digital technologies in co-production has been seen as relatively uncontroversial where values of effectiveness and efficiency dominate. These conclusions highlight that values of effectiveness and efficiency, which incorporate market-based values which are pillars of NPM (Osborne 2006), dominate the introduction of ICTs in co-production. However, from Table 30.2 Roles of digital technologies in co-production and its link with types of good governance

Roles

Instrumental Transformative Substitutive

Types of good governance Proper governance

Performing governance

Responsive governance

Neutral Risk Risk

Promise Promise Promise

Promise Promise Risk

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a constitutional perspective, proper and responsive governance are as important. This perspective might be seen as conservative in times where innovation is the new ‘magic concept’ (Pollitt and Hupe 2011) to frame transformations of the public sector. The necessity for democratic involvement and societal debate on ICT-based co-production is higher when digital technologies are transformative or substitutive, because risks to values such as lawfulness, equality and participation are higher in those cases. Since responsive governance intuitively seems in line with co-production, risks in this field might be overlooked more easily. We show that when digital technologies lead to the substitution of co-production, either by self-organising citizens or technology, there are significant risks for responsive governance values of, among others, participation and legitimacy. A limitation of this study is the set of public values we chose to include in our inquiry, based on existing literature on public values (De Graaf et al. 2016). One could argue that certain public values important in an information age, namely privacy, should be incorporated into an analysis on ICT-based coproduction and public values. This has not been the case because national governments have not (yet) included them in their ‘codes of good governance’. Concerns on the negative impact of ICT-based co-production on privacy have been raised (Meijer 2012) but deserve further (empirical) investigation. We propose to include privacy in further research into the relation between ICTs and proper governance. This paper results in a call for action: a strong emphasis on public values is needed if we want to develop forms of co-production that are not only effective and efficient but also proper and responsive. While the impact that digital technologies have on co-production might be abstract, the risks for public values are substantive enough to press society to find solutions to incorporate more inclusive democracy in practices of ICT-based co-production. Approaches to value-sensitive design (Friedman et al. 2008) are not yet wellknown in the public administration but they may form a good starting point for de-instrumentalising debates on ICT-based co-production.

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Grimmelikhuijsen, S. G., & Meijer, A. J. (2015). Does Twitter increase perceived police legitimacy? Public Administration Review, 75(4), 598–607. Jakobsen, M. (2013). Can government initiatives increase citizen coproduction? Results of a randomized field experiment. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 23(1), 27–54. Jørgensen, T. B., & Sørensen, D. L. (2012). Codes of good governance: National or global public values? Public Integrity, 15(1), 71–96. Lember, V. (2018). The role of new technologies in co-production. In Brandsen, T., Steen, T. & Verschuere, B. (Eds.), Co-production and co-creation: Engaging citizens in public service delivery. New York, NY: Routledge. Lember, V., Brandsen, T., & Tõnurist, P. (2019). The potential impacts of digital technologies on co-production and co-creation. Public Management Review, 21(11), 1665–1686. Lettl, C., Herstatt, C., & Gemuenden, H. G. (2006). Users’ contributions to radical innovation: Evidence from four cases in the field of medical equipment technology. R&D Management, 36(3), 251–272. Linders, D. (2012). From e-government to we-government: Defining a typology for citizen coproduction in the age of social media. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 446–454. Meijer, A. (2012). Co-production in an information age: Individual and community engagement supported by new media. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 23(4), 1156–1172. Meijer, A. (2016). Coproduction as a structural transformation of the public sector. International Journal of Public Sector Management, 29(6), 596–611. Meijer, A. J. (2014). New media and the coproduction of safety: An empirical analysis of Dutch practices. The American Review of Public Administration, 44(1), 17–34. Meijer, A., & Wessels, M. (2019). Predictive policing: Review of benefits and drawbacks. International Journal of Public Administration, 42(12), 1031–1039. Mergel, I. (2016). Social media in the public sector. In D. Bearfield & M. Dubnick (Eds.), Encyclopedia of public administration and public policy (pp. 3018–3021). Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Moon, M. J. (2018). Evolution of co-production in the information age: Crowdsourcing as a model of web-based co-production in Korea. Policy and Society, 37 (3), 294–309. O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction. How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. UK: Allen Lane. O’Rourke, D. (2013, September 24). From crisis management to prevention: How the Lambeth Living Well Collaborative is driving the transformation of mental health services. Governance International. Retrieved from http://www.govint.org/good-practice/case-studies/from-crisis-managementto-prevention-the-lambeth-living-well-collaborative/objectives/. Osborne, S. P. (2006). The new public governance? Public Management Review, 8(3), 377–387. Osborne, D., & Gaebler. T. (1992). Reinventing government: How the entrepreneurial spirit Is transforming the public sector. New York: Addision-Wesley.

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CHAPTER 31

Governance Challenges in Co-production Steven Rathgeb Smith

In the last 30 years, profound changes in the management and delivery of public services have occurred: greater contracting for services with non-profit and for-profit organizations; more competition for funding; and ‘pay-forsuccess’ results management. A key component of this public service reform has also been renewed attention to the co-production of services which generally refers to the active participation of service users and citizens with professionals and volunteers in the development and delivery of key public services. In recent decades, co-production was initially used to refer to the reliance of street-level bureaucrats such as teachers and the police on citizens to actually produce education or policing (Parks et al. 1981; Brudney and England 1983). More recently, co-production has received support from the New Public Management (NPM) movement to encourage more efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation in the public services. Non-profit organisations are predictable and logical homes for expanded ‘co-production’ because their community roots offer an opportunity for voluntarism and citizen participation (Boyle and Harris 2009; Evers and Ewert 2015; Bovaird 2007; Smith and Phillips 2016; Parrado et al. 2013; Fledderus et al. 2015; Alford 2009; Brandsen et al. 2018). Many examples of co-production involving non-profits exist: self-help programmes for mentally ill and individuals with substance abuse; government contracting S. R. Smith (B) American Political Science Association and McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

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with a local community agency to support a clubhouse programme for at-risk teenagers; and a parent education programme to promote positive early child development (Parrado et al. 2013; Evers and Ewert 2015). Increasingly, many for-profit community firms also offer various co-production options. For example, a for-profit agency for ex-prisoners on parole might rely heavily upon clients to help in their own readjustment to the community. Co-production through community organisations has also been facilitated by the greater utilisation of vouchers which typically involve a government subsidy directly to an individual to purchase services from public or private organisations. Vouchers for primary education or community care for older adults are good examples. Public service reform has thus fostered many different forms of coproduction as well as substantial innovation and experimentation in public, non-profit and for-profit services. But co-production programmes also present complicated governance dilemmas, especially for programmes with public funding, including daunting challenges related to community participation, programme design and sustainability. Governance, in this context, refers to the internal politics of the organisation that can be affected by the relationship between the government and the co-production programmes. Thus, this chapter will offer a detailed examination of the challenges and obstacles faced by co-production programmes including the development of sustainable programme models offering equitable and ongoing citizen and client participation.

Background The broad interest in co-production in recent years reflects many different trends affecting public services and civil society. Government budgets have become strained in many countries, leading policymakers to explore new, lower cost strategies for addressing public problems. Higher expectations for accountability and performance have also encouraged more interest in policy innovation, especially through community members and organisations. The widespread attention to the role of community organisations in building social capital through collaborative community networks (Putnam 2000) has promoted the idea of citizen and community participation in local service delivery. Co-production also fits with the desire of citizens for more consumer and client choice. The traditional model of public services relied upon professionals developing and choosing various services with relatively little citizen input or control: professionals in public or non-profit organisations would develop programmes and services and then decide, subject to government regulations, who should receive service and the substantive content of the service, except for local organisations with community members on their board or staff. A classic example might be a government caseworker providing counseling services to a disadvantaged jobseeker. Alternatively, a non-profit mental health programme might offer a job training programme for their clients. Or the staff of a home care agency might decide the relevant services for their

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elderly and disabled clients. To be sure the success of these services hinges on the response and cooperation of individuals. Teachers need to have engaged students and police benefit from a cooperative citizenry who are willing to help the police combat crime. The recent movement in support of co-production is based upon the premise of more direct collaboration and engagement by professional and citizens (Ostrom 1996). As co-production has become more prevalent, it has also diversified. One strand of co-production has its roots in the self-help movement for individuals with mental illness, a disability or substance abuse. For example, mental health ‘clubhouses’ exist throughout the world, especially in urban areas (Ness 2014; Benjamin 2016). In the post-war period, people with mental illness created clubhouses or spaces to meet and support each other, similar to other self-groups. Over time, these clubhouses evolved into more fully developed services and programmes, often supported with public funds. In many clubhouses, professionals actively work together with individuals with mental illness to build their self-confidence and employment skills. The staff of these clubhouses might also be individuals with a history of mental illness. In many cases, these clubhouses receive public funding. A variation on this self-help, co-production model is a programme for homeless women in the United States that allowed the women in the programme to choose their front-line professional staff person and develop their individual programmatic goals and plans (Benjamin 2016). Another example is an advocacy agency in Pend Oreille County in Washington state supporting victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and other crimes through education, victim services and social change. Led and staffed by people with lived experiences of trauma and inequities, who provide a wide range of services in rural communities (Family Crisis Network 2020). Many domestic violence programmes in the United States have a similar requirement for the active engagement of the women in the programme. In the UK, ‘User Councils’ were created by ex-offenders to advise the prison system on programmes to help ex-offenders transition successfully into the community and to advocate for expanded in-house prison programmes to help train and rehabilitate prisoners. The User Councils work closely with the prison staff (Hine-Hughes 2011). A programme in the United States for homeless youth also has a Youth Advisory Board and peer outreach programme that works closely with the front-line staff (Benjamin 2016). Many social enterprises that blend market activities and social mission also emphasise collaboration between clients or users and professionals. For example, Farestart, based in Seattle, is a non-profit that operates a restaurant staffed by disadvantaged persons who also receive training in the restaurant trade. Delancey Street is a comprehensive substance abuse programme with locations in different parts of the country. This agency operates a number of market-based services such as landscaping and a restaurant that are staffed by clients in the programme. Many micro-finance programmes such as Kiva and

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the Grameen Bank are based upon a programmatic model dependent upon the active participation of poor men and women in creating new business activity. Many programmes reliant primarily on volunteers also illustrate another type of co-production model. A mentoring programme for youth such as Big Brother/Big Sister depends upon volunteer mentors who work with at-risk youth and collaboratively with the agency staff. Many literacy programmes are based upon the premise of collaboration between volunteers and educational professionals. A wide variety of other similar types of programmes exist. One other important category of co-production is the joint planning and development of services and programmes. In the 1960s, many non-profit organisations were established by local organisers to take greater control over the services in their community. Since then, a diverse array of co-production initiatives around the world exemplify the desire of community to be more engaged in local service delivery. Citizens might work with local officials to repurpose an abandoned factory for new uses. Neighbourhood or ethnic associations work with the police on crime prevention strategies or the city on youth programming. Somali Community Services of Seattle relies on staff and volunteers from the Somali community and works closely with municipal agencies on a range of important programmes. The Arc of King County, Washington, serves citizens with development disabilities who also are represented on their board of directors and as staff and volunteers. In general, non-profits are more conducive to co-production than other types of organisation (Pestoff 2014; Alford 2009). Public organisations face a variety of legal constraints in terms of their ability to flexibly respond to constituents and create joint programming. For-profit firms face complicated dilemmas regarding co-production as they have to balance market incentives with co-production which often requires a commitment to a social mission (Skelcher and Smith 2015). Non-profits, by contrast, place a priority on responsiveness to their community of interest. This community could be a neighbourhood, an ethnic group, a city or a group of people with a shared identity and purpose (Smith and Lipsky 1993). Non-profits are less-rule bound than public organisations and thus allow greater opportunity for client and citizen engagement in services. Governance in co-production has also been affected by the movement towards various Pay-for-Success models including performance contracting and social impact bonds. A focus on specific outcome or performance measures can create difficult internal organisational clashes on the measures of programme outcomes and success. The requirements for data collection and reporting also create complex concerns on transparency, confidentiality and client privacy. These issues are especially urgent with co-production since, as noted, many co-production programmes require the active engagement of volunteers, citizens and clients in the planning and implementation of services. More generally, concerns about co-production have been recently raised by Steen et al. (2018, 284) who called attention to the ‘dark side of co-creation and co-production’ that included seven evils including: the deliberate rejection

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of responsibility, failing accountability, rising transaction costs, loss of democracy, reinforced inequalities, implicit demands and co-destruction. Oliver et al. (2019) also discuss the ‘dark side of co-production’ with specific reference to collaboration between health policy scholars and practitioners. Also, Loeffler and Bovaird (2019) discuss the ‘dysfunctional implications of co-production’ based upon their research on policing and community justice. Overall, these articles clearly state the need for more analysis of the potential drawbacks of co-production and the need to carefully scrutinise the governance, design and context for coproduction programmes.

Governance and Co-production: Challenges and Unintended Consequences Co-production offers many opportunities for innovation, improved effectiveness and citizen engagement. Yet the very characteristics of co-production that are attractive to funders, policymakers and practitioners also create governance difficulties, especially as co-production programmes become intertwined with government and public policy. A classic example of co-production is a community group organized to help at-risk youth in their community. Initially the group is entirely composed of volunteers and their youth programming relies upon these volunteers. Governance is informal and decision-making is typically by consensus. Funding tends to be from small cash and in-kind donations especially from the core volunteers. Many of these informal groups eventually seek non-profit legal status in order to receive public and private funding and liability protection. The board of directors of the new organisation is usually comprised of founding members and volunteers. Over time, though, the organisation may seek public funding or foundation grants to expand their services to their target group of at-risk youth. Public funding, though, can create markedly different programmatic and governance expectations. Indeed, more than ever, government officials are focused on measuring outcomes and using evidence-based policies that require service organisations to adopt best practices as identified in the existing research. Attendant to these performance regimes is more reporting requirements, which also require the addition of more professionals at the administrative and service delivery levels. In particular, professionals with degrees may be substituted for clients who rely upon their experience and knowledge of a specific social problem. For example, substance abuse treatment programmes in the United States and elsewhere were for many years staffed primarily with individuals in recovery; thus, their personal experience with addiction served as their essential programmatic qualification. The boundary between client and staff was often blurry. But the introduction of evidencebased treatment, often mandated as part of public funding, can lead to a shift towards individuals with advanced degrees, replacing people in recovery. Thus,

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programme management shifts towards more professionals and less engaged co-production. Professionalisation can also occur at the board level. The agency for at-risk youth, noted above, will face pressure as its government funding increases to add individuals to their board with political and resource connections who can also advise the agency on the complicated regulatory and legal concerns pertaining to government contracts. To the extent the board professionalises, then it is also more likely that the staff will evolve in the same direction. To be sure, this shift to professionalisation in co-production programmes can reflect the process of organisational development and different lifecycle stages. Further, non-profits may need to professionalise in order to develop sustainable business models, given the heightened expectations of public and private funders for accountability and improved performance. However, governance can be substantively altered in the process, potentially undermining the possibility of client and citizen engagement. Governance in co-production can also be profoundly affected by a value congruence problem. Many different variations exist. For instance, the staff of a non-profit might be attracted to work or volunteer in the agency because specific goals and values in the mission such as service to Latino youth in a particular community. But government regulations and rules may require an adaptation of this agency mission in ways that are at significant variance with the values of existing staff. The result can produce unfortunate governance problems. First, individuals may leave the organisation if they are unhappy with the agency’s direction—the so-called exit option (Hirschman 1970). The result can be high turnover among board members and staff, producing organisational instability and the loss of valuable staff knowledge and experience. Another manifestation of the exit option is that staff and volunteers will not fully devote themselves to the organisation. So, they may become more passive and less engaged employees and volunteers. Second, problems in value congruence can create internal gridlock. Organisations can be considered to have different institutional logics or norms that structure legitimacy and the identity of staff and volunteers. Public organisations have a state logic and for-profit organisations have a market logic. Non-profit organisations, the locus of many co-production initiatives, have a community/social mission logic (Skelcher and Smith 2015). In the context of co-production, a clash of values, or logics, can easily lead to a ‘blocked’ organisation, characterised by irresolvable contradiction between competing logics. For example, a domestic violence programme founded on the principle of democracy and client and staff engagement may be required to institute new more hierarchical and bureaucratic decision-making rules in order to comply with the demands of public funders. An attempt to integrate these two logics can lead to a dysfunctional organisation and/or varying levels of staff conflict and dissatisfaction.

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Co-production programmes are especially susceptible to value congruence clashes and difficulties because many programmes rely upon purposive incentives of engagement and social mission to motivate staff and volunteers to participate (see Wilson 1973). This commitment can also lead an organisation to remain steadfast in its adherence to a specific vision and set of values that may, over time, be mismatched with the funding environment. For instance, an organisation might try to resist the introduction of new state-mandated performance targets for their programmes required by public funding because of the dedication of their staff and volunteers to an alternative set of goals and priorities. This values mismatch between the state and the agency could eventually lead to a loss of funding for the agency as the agency falls from favour with the state. Even the threat of funding loss can create organisational dysfunction or changes in governance. Thus, an agency might decide to replace its founding board members with individuals who have connections to funding resources including government and foundation funding. Or put another way, government can exert substantial influence over the internal operations of non-profit, without even intervening directly; instead a non-profit may realize that they are unlikely to obtain continued funding unless they change their governance and programmatic orientation. However, government can also try to control the operations of non-profits in an effort to prevent a divergence between the priorities of government and staff, users and community members of non-profits engaged in co-production. The introduction of new performance regimes such as performance contracting can mean that government reimbursement for many programmes including job training or prison re-entry is contingent upon the attainment of specific performance targets such as the number of individuals placed in permanent employment or the rate at which ex-prisoners avoided a return to prison. In essence, performance contracting can be regarded as an effort by government (the principal) to control the behaviour of its agent (the non-profit providers). (For insight into the principal–agent problem in contracting, see Donahue 1989). Performance contracting requires the collection of extensive amounts of data in order to demonstrate the adherence of non-profit staff and volunteers to government contracting rules and priorities. And it is possible that front-line workers in non-profits such as caseworkers can evade government rules, creating a governance problem of non-compliance. As Lipsky (1980) observed, front-line workers—or street-level bureaucrats—possess considerable discretion on the job. Consequently, the staff, volunteers and clients of a non-profit might resist or circumvent compliance with government contracting regulations. Workers might go beyond the rules to offer extra assistance to clients, delay completing required reports or try to exercise their ‘voice’ and actually try to change the regulations. Thus, agency leaders could directly negotiate with government officials on performance expectations and rules or they could join an association representing their interests to government policymakers. While these efforts to change policy may yield

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some success, it often does not fundamentally change the individual agency situation; as a result, the governance dilemma and values mismatch are likely to remain unless agency leadership and staff leave the agency and are replaced with staff who embrace the existing performance rules. Another variant of this performance management is the evidence-based practice movement which seeks to have health and social service intervention to be guided by research on the most successful programmes and interventions (Metz et al. 2007; Smith and Phillips 2016). Significantly, the introduction of these models may require co-production programmes to change their staffing. For instance, a drug treatment programme reliant on individuals in recovery may need to institute new more intensive professional practices, thus possibly displacing individuals with lower skills and/or less educational credentials. Depending on the programme, this change could disproportionately affect individuals in recovery. Co-production programmes also face significant governance challenges related to the transparency of agency operations and services (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019). As noted, many co-production programmes started informally by individuals passionate about addressing a community problem. Monitoring and evaluation are typically a low priority in developing and implementing a new programme or intervention such as a park clean-up programme using atrisk youth or a mental health club. But transparency and accountability can be elusive. Volunteers may be well-meaning in terms of their contributions to an organisation but less than diligent in comprehensively reporting their activities. Many citizens for example are interested in time-limited activities rather than long-term, intensive programme involvement. Also, overseeing the activities of clients and volunteers requires an adequate management infrastructure and capacity which can be difficult for many smaller community agencies to establish and sustain (Steen et al. 2018). Implementation of these management systems can also create the value conflict noted above. Indeed, some co-production initiatives such as domestic violence programmes or mental health clubs may believe that certain types of monitoring systems are incompatible with their programme goals and mission. Consequently, these agencies may resist rigorous management oversight and external evaluation. Also, many co-production programmes are small so they usually face lower reporting requirements than larger organisations. A local block association may only have a budget of $25,000 a year and no paid staff, although they may collaborate extensively with educational professionals. It may be difficult to track accurately the activities of the association. In the United States, they would not be required to provide any detailed financial or programmatic information to national, state or local authorities. One could argue this lack of transparency is not a major public policy concern since these organisations tend to be small and narrowly targeted. Yet, the issue remains as an enduring problem for co-production: the attractiveness of these initiatives is rooted in part in innovation, self-help, mutual aid and community roots. But coproduction programmes can at the same time be compromised by a lack of

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accountability and transparency which may over time discourage participation and external funding.

Sustaining Participation and Engagement Classic co-production examples such as a mental health club or a community coalition to fight substance abuse rely upon citizen participation and collaboration. For instance, a community coalition might be started by local citizens concerned about rising incidence of substance abuse. Coalition founders may be able to organise initial planning meetings but it is very difficult to sustain participation without adequate resources. One possibility is government contracts and grants which typically have various performance requirements and expectations. This money also may only be for a relatively short period of time such as two years, creating financial difficulties and instability. Private funding from foundations is also typically short-term. As a result, members of the coalition can easily leave the coalition if they do not believe they are receiving value for their participation. In this regard, resources clearly play a role; without funding, it is very difficult to move a programme forward. Importantly, the real and perceived value can also be contingent on the governance structure of co-production programmes. Two examples illustrate this important point. First, the community anti-substance abuse coalition might include representatives of several local public and private agencies in town as well as local citizens and activists. The governance of the coalition needs to be regarded as equitable, otherwise some members may decide to leave. Also, some members may decide to stop their participation if the distribution of resources from grants and contracts is viewed as unfair. These two issues are also related: appropriate and legitimate governance will produce fairer resource distribution. Second, a mental health club such as Mosaic Clubhouse in London is guided by the principle of partnership between staff and clients (or members) in agency decision-making and governance. Indeed, the Clubhouse is deliberately understaffed in order to promote client participation and equity in decision-making (Mosaic 2020). Many other co-production programmes such as domestic violence programmes and substance abuse treatment programmes have the same commitment to staff–client partnership. But this type of decision-making requires very diligent and careful leadership and ongoing attention. It can be disrupted quite easily and government funding with its performance expectations can lead to internal disputes on the direction of the agency. Partnership in governance can also be time-consuming and arguably requires agency leadership that is comfortable with sharing responsibility and less hierarchical organisational structures. Co-production can also present more general engagement challenges (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019). A useful framework to understand these difficulties is offered by James Q. Wilson (1973), a noted political scientist, who observed that individuals are motivated to join organisations by three primary incentives:

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material, solidary and purposive. Material incentives can be direct monetary payments or more indirect benefits that can accrue to a person’s agency or programme. Solidary benefits tend to be the fellowship and social capital of participation in a collective endeavour. And purposive incentives relate to the cause or mission of the organisation. Co-production programmes often rely heavily upon solidary and purposive incentives since they are often underfunded and depend upon volunteers and the willingness of staff to work for modest wages in service of larger goals and missions. But a reliance on purposive incentives tends to build into the programme at least some measure of instability. That is, a community member might decide to join an anti-drug coalition primarily for the stated purpose; yet if the coalition has trouble reaching its goals, this individual may become dissatisfied. One potential consequence of government funding is that it can shift the mission, or purposes, of the agency in ways contrary to the vision of original volunteers and staff. Solidary incentives can be an important motivator for engagement in coproduction but they also tend to skew participation. Many co-production initiatives start as community initiatives among friends and colleagues dedicated to a specific cause or idea. So the social capital existing among community members facilitates engagement and also helps with the development and implementation of agency programmes. And this trust can be built by repeated interaction among local citizens who know each other. But a reliance on trust and more generally solidary incentives can produce inequalities in participation (see Steen et al. 2018). Some citizens outside the founding group may be disinclined to participate, especially lower income citizens who may face economic barriers to participation. Overcoming inequities in participation in local co-production programmes can require extensive preparation and ongoing attention. To achieve equity in participation in a community coalition may necessitate ongoing outreach, special appeals and resources to support the participation of a wide array of groups. Moreover, co-production programmes with diversity in participation may then find that groups hold very different ideas on goals and priorities. Attracting and sustaining diversity in participation has many dimensions. Professionals are often comfortable with planning and implementation meetings including the norms of engagement. However, many citizens may not have extensive experience with programmatic development and attendant meetings, creating a potential mismatch in expectations (Loeffler and Bovaird 2019). Seemingly straightforward activities such as the preferred rules governing meetings can be a source of discord. To be sure, laypeople and volunteers unfamiliar with various procedures can learn new policies and procedures but it does involve time and adequate training and incentives. Many participatory democracy initiatives aim to provide this support. For example, Community to Community in Washington state strives to empower local immigrants to have an ‘equal voice in decision making’ (Community to

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Community 2020). Another example is the worldwide movement for ‘participatory budgeting’, a mode of co-production that involves direct participation of local citizens in the municipal budgeting process and their collaboration with professional politicians and administrators. Participatory budgeting has been adopted in a wide variety of settings around the world; the record of these efforts suggests that equity in participation requires a deliberate effort to provide appropriate incentives and opportunities (Fung 2006). Without the proper incentives, participatory budgeting programmes can easily become dominated by the local professionals. Government funding of these co-production initiatives can further complicate the efforts to attract diverse participation. A common occurrence is the following scenario: a local community development initiative comprised of professionals and local citizens receives a grant from state government to be used for new economic development projects. The governance of this programme is guided by a board of directors representing different individuals and organisations in the local community. But the new money is likely to have differential effects in the community, prompting internal discussions about the allocation of the money. The resulting competition for money can prompt some members to cease their participation if they do not believe they have had ample opportunity to influence the organisational decisionmaking process. For this reason, the governance structure is especially critical. Community members may also be reluctant to join new programmes because of distrust of government. In the last 50 years, many impoverished communities have been sites of a succession of sometimes misguided social programmes designed to address poverty and achieve economic revitalisation. Some of these programmes failed meaningfully to engage the community. Consequently, a new programme might be greeted with great skepticism, making it difficult to obtain sustained, representative local engagement. The staff and volunteers of co-production programmes can change attitudes regarding participation but it does involve significant outreach and consultation with local citizens and key stakeholders. Importantly, equity in decision-making does not simply refer to sharing of responsibility among professionals and citizens including clients, a central component of co-production. Citizen participation is often very unevenly distributed. Neighbourhood associations are frequently dominated by a small coterie of citizens. Community anti-drug coalitions find that it is much easier to engage citizens who are lawyers, doctors and other professionals than disadvantaged community members. Concerted action and good leadership are required to engage a broad spectrum of the community. Many community-based co-production programmes like community coalitions or an economic development project also face another type of challenge in sustaining engagement: these organisations and groups are often comprised of representatives of many different public and private organisations. It is truly organised as a complex public–private partnership that requires joint action by the various stakeholders and participants. In the beginning, the leadership

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of the member organisations may be quite willing to engage actively in the governance of the agency. Over time, though, the key leaders of members organisations may become occupied with other responsibilities and send their subordinates. The replacements may not have full decision-making authority and thus they will have to consult with their own leadership about coalition governance. The subordinates may be less committed to the programme and also have less leadership talent. This situation may not necessarily lead to internal conflict but it can produce a very slow process for making important decisions. The inability to take timely action can then lead to dissatisfaction and a difficulty in implementing and sustaining programmes. This problem can be mitigated through procedures that stipulate key expectations on member representation but ultimately it also depends on the ability of the organisations to deliver results. For this reason, the ultimate success of co-production programmes may hinge on the initial decisions made on representation and governance. If a programme begins slowly, it can precipitate a downwards spiral of inaction and then growing disengagement. Creating and maintaining equitable and inclusive participation also cannot be separated from financial considerations affecting co-production programmes. Co-production programmes require resources even if they substantially depend upon client and volunteer engagement. A programme for at-risk youth that engages youth in local community activities such as a Latino agency in Seattle, El Centro de La Raza, needs paid staff to train, mentor and oversee the youth. Initial philanthropic grants can facilitate the initial start-up but these grants are often short-term so eventually the programme will have to transition to more secure funding which is often government funding. Importantly, resources are typically needed to facilitate equity in participation as well. Co-production programmes operated by social enterprises may also have their own set of financial dilemmas. Social enterprises are non-profit or for-profit organisations that blend a social mission and a market orientation. A typical example is a non-profit agency with a restaurant employing disadvantaged individuals who develop marketable skills as part of their employment. To operate a functional restaurant, the non-profit needs to employ individuals who are likely to be successful at their jobs, even though they need training. This key imperative is particularly important because this type of non-profit relies on the revenue from the restaurant to support its overall operations, although it may receive funding from other sources including government. Due to this financial incentive, or as it is sometimes called ‘the double bottomline’, it can be very difficult to sustain the participation of individuals with low skills and an absence of a significant work record. Secure public funding can help mitigate this problem to an extent by relieving financial pressure on the agency. But, as noted, public funding also brings the regulatory compliance challenges. Sustainability in the context of co-production also hinges on the complex relationship between the formal and informal sectors (Bulmer 1987). As noted, many co-production programmes emerge from the informal sector

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which comprises family, community, friends, congregations and self-help groups. This sector can bring flexibility, responsiveness and possibly innovation to new co-production initiatives. The attractiveness of the informal sector also relies, at least in part, on a romanticised vision of community where neighbours help neighbours, solve important local problems, and care for the needy. And to be sure, many examples of neighbours spontaneously helping community members exist especially in times of crisis such as a natural disaster or emergency. Many congregations also help support local social programmes with volunteers and direct cash donations. Many co-production initiatives essentially rely on ‘interweaving’ between the informal and formal sectors. The latter typically refers to government, nonprofit and for-profit agencies that offer structured services with professionals and volunteers. Many examples of this interweaving exist. Aging in PACE, an elder service agency serving the Asian–American community in Seattle, works closely with senior citizens, family members and health care providers to develop appropriate programmes to help the elderly to age in place. A group of local ministers might band together to advocate for more services for the homeless, eventually securing a government grant for expanded shelter and support programmes. Parents might start an early childhood programme but then enter into a collaboration with the local school district. A parent group supporting their disabled children might eventually incorporate as a formal non-profit organisation and then receive a government contract. Arguably, this interweaving of the formal and informal sector exists along a continuum from friends and family helping a neighbour in financial distress to a public agency with a partnership with a local non-profit to provide services to the chronic mentally ill. Yet this interweaving and its sustainability is challenged by the characteristics of both the formal and informal sector. For this reason, sustaining the involvement of community members and clients in co-production can be very challenging. Formal agencies can be inflexible in applying regulations on funding and programmatic implementation. These agencies may also have great difficulty developing innovative approaches to social problems. The informal sector, though, has its own limitations. Participation by community members can be very unequally distributed. And community members may not have the expertise to deal adequately with complex problems. The parent mentoring local children may find himself inadequately prepared to help children with special needs. A neighbourhood association charged with cleaning the municipal parks may find it difficult to recruit a reliable base of community members. Persons with mental illness participating in a clubhouse programme may at times require much more intensive services than offered by the clubhouse. Senior citizens and disabled people with personal budgets to purchase community care services may be unable to obtain the necessary information to make informed choices on the appropriate professional services to meet their clinical needs.

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Some of the best examples of collaboration can arise on ‘an ad hoc basis, as when a professional is able to form a consultative relationship with a neighborhood helper who provides friendly reassurance to elderly neighbors; an outreach team is able to form an informal support system of hotel managers, board and care operators, bartenders and grocery clerks in promoting the community adjustment of the chronically mentally ill; or when informal working relationships are established between mutual aid or self-help groups and professionals’ (Froland 1980, as quoted by Bulmer 1987, 187). But these collaborations can be unstable. Professionals may try to assume control. Participation by community members may falter and resources may be reduced, especially during periods of government austerity. And confusion may exist on the proper roles and responsibilities of the different sectors which can also blend together with resource and participation difficulties. For example, many clubhouse programmes have a ‘work order day’ where persons with chronic mental illness work together with professionals who direct the organisation. Everyone is expected to contribute to programme operations but the clubhouse typically does not have a participation requirement since it would undermine client independence and decision-making. But this non-participation requirement creates dilemmas for staff who depend upon members to work with them for the good of the overall clubhouse programming (Benjamin 2016). Sustaining these co-production programmes also hinges on creating resilient systems and relationships that can weather crises. The local government funding agency may have an unexpected budget shortfall. One of the programme directors may have to relocate to another locality. Or a surge in service demand could occur. Resilient programmes able to weather these crises or unforeseen events require ongoing capacity building and training. The staff of government or non-profit programmes need to invest in their ability to adequately oversee and monitor programmes. Moreover, collaboration with local citizens may require these staff to learn new engagement and outreach strategies. Community members are likely also to require support and the appropriate incentives for engagement. Leadership development for professional staff and local volunteers is also important. Regardless of the level of training, though, resilient co-production systems require sufficient long-term financial support; austerity will undermine the viability of co-production over time and greatly reduce the ability of co-production programmes to have a meaningful impact of their communities.

Concluding Thoughts Since the 1990s, co-production has expanded to include a wide variety of programmes, providing many new opportunities for citizen and client engagement in the public services, broadly defined, throughout the world. Local communities have benefited by the introduction of innovative collaborations

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between professionals and citizens in a wide variety of policy fields—from criminal justice to community care to economic development. Yet, co-production also poses complex governance challenges, especially for organisations with public funding that can significantly affect the sustainability and success of co-production. Good leadership of course makes a difference, as it does for other types of organisations. But the leadership and staff of co-production programmes also need to be well-versed in the complexities of forging collaborative networks among individuals with quite diverse backgrounds and expectations. Adequate resources are also a critical success factor that helps provide appropriate incentives for the development and sustainability. Indeed, the prolonged government austerity in many countries, and now the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, has underscored the fragility of co-production programmes in circumstances of funding cutbacks and insufficient safety net support for community members. To be sure, fiscal scarcity can be a spur to innovation but co-production programmes underpinned by an expectation of sustained voluntarism by community members and philanthropic donations may falter over time. Instead, leaders of the public and non-profit sector need to view coproduction as a valuable and innovative tool of public policy that requires good leadership, sound programmatic design, appropriate accountability processes, and necessary funding. In these challenging times for the public services and local communities, co-production programmes can then fulfill their promise of engaging staff, volunteers and citizens in promoting citizen engagement, improving the life situation of local citizens and providing more effective community problem-solving. Acknowledgements The author is very grateful for the feedback and advice of Putnam Barber, Lehn Benjamin, Tony Bovaird, and Elke Loeffler during the preparation and writing of this chapter.

References Alford, J. 2009. Engaging Public Sector Clients: From Service-Delivery to CoProduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Benjamin, L. M. 2016. Client Co-Production in Nonprofits: Possibilities and Dilemmas of Moderating Rules. Paper presented at the biennial conference of the International Society for Third Sector Research, Stockholm. Bovaird, T. 2007. Beyond Engagement and Participation: User and Community CoProduction of Public Services. Public Administration Review, 67(5), 846–60. Boyle, D., & Harris, M. 2009. The Challenge of Co-production: How Equal Partnerships between Professionals and the Public Are Crucial to Improving Public Services. London: NESTA. https://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/312ac8ce93a00d5 973_3im6i6t0e.pdf. Brandsen, T., Steen, T., & Verschuere, B. (Eds.). 2018. Co-production and Cocreation. Engaging Citizens in Public Services. London/New York: Routledge. Brudney, J., & England, R.E. 1983. Toward a Definition of the Coproduction Concept. Public Administration Review, 43(1), 59–65.

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Bulmer, M. 1987. The Social Basis of Community Care. Oxon, UK: Routledge Revivals, republished in 2015. Community to Community. 2020. Mission/Vision. http://www.foodjustice.org/mis sion. Donahue, J. 1989. The Privatization Decision. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Evers, A., & Ewert, B. 2015. Social Innovation for Social Cohesion. In A. Nicholls, J. Simon, & Gabriel, M. (Eds.). New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research. SpringerLink. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137506801. Family Crisis Network. 2020. http://www.pofcn.org/index.html. Fledderus, J., Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. E. 2015. User Co-production of Public Service Delivery: An Uncertainty Approach. Public Policy and Administration, 30(2), 145–64. Fung, A.. 2006. Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance. Public Administration Review, Special Issue (December), 66–75. Hine-Hughes, F. 2011. User Voice’s Council Model: Only Offenders Can Stop ReOffending. Governance International Case Studies. http://www.govint.org/goodpractice/case-studies/user-voices-council-model/objectives/. Hirschman, A. O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lipsky, M. 1980. Street-Level Bureaucracy. New York: Russell Sage. Loeffler, E., & Bovaird, T. 2019. Assessing the Impact of Co-production on Pathways to Outcomes in Public Services: The Case of Policing and Criminal Justice. International Public Management Journal, 23(1), 205–23. Metz, A. J. R., Blasé, K., & Bowie, L. 2007. Implementing Evidence-Based Practices: Six Drivers of Success. Part 3 in a Series on Fostering the Adoption of EvidenceBased Practices in Out-of-School Time Programs. Child Trends. https://www.chi ldtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/2007-14WhatIsEBP.pdf. Mosaic Clubhouse. 2020. What We Do. https://www.mosaic-clubhouse.org/whatwe-do. Ness, M. 2014. Outcomes-Based Commissioning and Public Service Transformation in Mosaic Clubhouse Lambeth. Governance International Case Studies. http:// www.govint.org/good-practice/case-studies/outcomes-based-commissioning-andpublic-service-transformation-in-mosaic-clubhouse-lambeth/objectives/. Oliver, K., Kothari, A., & Mays, N. 2019. The Dark Side of Coproduction: Do the Costs Outweigh the Benefits for Health Research. Health Research Policy and Systems, 17, 33. Ostrom, E. 1996. Crossing the Great Divide: Coproduction, Synergy, and Development. World Development, 24(6), 1073–87. Parks, R. B., et al. 1981. Consumers as Coproducers of Public Services: Some Economic and Institutional Considerations. Policy Studies Journal, 9(7), 1001–11. Parrado, S., van Ryzin, G., Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. 2013. Correlates of CoProduction: Evidence from a Five-Nation Survey of Citizens. International Public Management Journal, 16(1), 1–28. Pestoff, V. 2014. Collective Action and the Sustainability of Coproduction. Public Management Review, 16(3), 383–401. Putnam, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Skelcher, C., & Smith, S. R. 2015. Theorizing Hybridity: Institutional Logics, Complex Organizations, and Actor Identities: The Case of Nonprofits. Public Administration, 92(4), 433–48. Smith, S.R., & Lipsky, M. 1993. Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Smith, S. R., & Phillips, S.D. 2016. The Changing and Challenging Environment of Nonprofit Human Services: Implications for Governance and Program Implementation. Nonprofit Policy Forum, 7(1), 63–76. Steen, T., Brandsen, T., & Verschuere, B. 2018. The Dark Side of Co-Creation and Co-Production: Seven Evils. In T. Brandsen, T. Steen, and B. Verschuere, (Eds.). Co-Production and Co-Creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services. New York: Routledge (pp. 284–93). Wilson, J. Q. 1973. Political Organizations. New York: Basic.

CHAPTER 32

Understanding, Analysing and Addressing Conflicts in Co-production Anna Scolobig and Louise Gallagher

Introduction Co-production is suited to address problems where consensus is low, uncertainty high and collaboration, co-decision and joint action is needed. Recent developments in co-production science posit it as a process seeking to connect knowledge and action in an effort to bring about social change (Voorberg et al. 2015). Co-production processes aim to bring a plurality of views, knowledge, resources and assets together for creating new knowledge about complex problems and for navigating them equitably and effectively under uncertainty (Bodin 2017; Reyers et al. 2015). These processes rest on the assumption that involving different stakeholders encourages ownership, responsibility and ultimately results in better or new decisions. There is increasing evidence showing that co-production can improve legitimacy of decisions and increase the likelihood of effective responses being identified and implemented (Cash et al. 2003; Clark et al. 2016; De Marchi 2003; Díaz et al. 2011). Moreover, it can provide fertile ground to overcome decision stalemates and deadlocks (Scolobig et al. 2016). Yet, co-production is certainly not a magic bullet to solve any kind of problem. It can also have detrimental effects like slowing down decision-making processes, generating new or polarising existing conflicts.

A. Scolobig (B) · L. Gallagher University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_32

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This is a subject that receives insufficient attention in the current thinking on co-production. There are now many suggested principles for instigating, executing and evaluating quality in co-production processes (van der Hel 2016; Verschuere et al. 2012; Wyborn et al. 2019), yet perhaps because of a suspected bias towards reporting successful co-production (Wyborn et al. 2019), we know little about conflicts underlying or emerging in these processes. In this chapter, we focus on conflicts in decision co-production, defined as analytical-deliberative procedures for professionals and citizens to make better use of each other’s assets, resources and contributions to achieve better public decision outcomes (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012). Our contribution is to shine a light on why conflicts might arise in co-production and to highlight how researcher–practitioners deal with these constructively, while also suggesting pathways for future research on this topic.

Conflicts in Co-production Decision co-production processes are often characterised by complexity and uncertainty because of the scale of interlinkages, varying views about what information counts, what will happen in the future and what actions to take for equitably distributed gains (Ostrom 2007). These processes are also increasingly characterised by the necessity to address wicked problems, where the nature of the problem is novel, not fully known or universally understood in the same way; and where the solution to one issue has the potential to create additional problems (Rittel and Webber 1973; Head and Alford 2015). Wicked problems are typically contested and difficult to address (Rayner 2017; Verweij and Thompson 2006). To determine a legitimate path of action to address them and to negotiate solutions to wicked problems, co-production processes can form part of adaptive governance strategies adopted by groups of actors, across sectors and/or scales (Bodin 2017; Folke et al. 2005; Innes and Boher 2010; Jasanoff 2004). Ongoing conflicts about the operational ‘rules in use’ (Ostrom 2007) about resource access and management synergies and trade-offs on which decision co-production focuses will inevitably surface in such processes. Other conflicts may be brought to light or triggered within the co-production process itself, depending on the principles and methods underpinning the process design, as well as the quality of execution. We focus on the latter and argue that such conflicts arise primarily from tensions between three intertwined elements: differences in values, beliefs, knowledge and preferences of stakeholders participating in the co-production process [hereafter: participantstakeholders]—what we call differences in views, see, for example, Jasanoff (2004), Thompson (2008), Verweij and Thompson (2006) and Wuppuluri and Doria (2018); the uneven distribution of resources, status and power between groups in society or people in co-production (Mills 1956, 2000); and, divergent expectations about the outcomes, including the need to make timely joint-decisions in complex systems on an ongoing basis under different

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visions of the future (Armitage et al. 2009; Bodin 2017; Cash et al. 2006; Cash et al. 2003; Zohlnhöfer and Rüb 2016). This assertion is supported by conflict research in collaborative resource planning and management (Baird et al. 2019), knowledge governance and co-production in sustainability science (Jasanoff 2004; Michailova and Foss 2009), political ecology (Robbins 2011) and private enterprise (e.g. Bettencourt et al. 2002). Differences in views. Diversity in perspectives and perceptions can lead to disagreements (Rokeach 1973) but incompatibility—emerging when the different alternatives in relation to a particular problem are mutually exclusive—is one crucial contributing factor for conflict. Cognitive and social psychology give some reasons why we hold different views built around our values, beliefs, knowledge, preferences and interests. What is more, the way we perceive problems or systems—our mental models—are subject to many biases. These cognitive maps are important because they heavily influence how we react to new information, make meaning from it and draw conclusions (Kahneman 2003; Tversky and Kahneman 1974). We are reluctant to give up our established assumptions and beliefs about the world when our mental models are challenged (Kahneman 2003). In adversarial conditions, we can end up relying on our emotional automatic cognitive processes rather than the deliberate operations of reasoning. As opposed to cognitive and social psychology traditions, anthropological studies postulate that differences in views derive from plural rationalities. These rationalities are limited in number and stem from different social contexts, which, in turn, are shaped by the ways in which people organise, perceive and justify their social relations (Douglas 1992; Thompson et al. 1990) (see Box 32.1 for description of plural rationality theory). Power relations and dynamics. Values, beliefs, interests and negotiation of these, both shape and are shaped by power differentials (Dowding 2008). Conflicts are rooted in existing power structures and dynamics between the stakeholders involved, or also between them and mandated authorities or experts involved in the processes. Structure determines agents’ power and their choices because values, strategies and choices are driven by norms, rules and resource constraints—and the expectations these create for the future (Dowding 2008; Giddens 1986; Lukes 2004). In turn, agency can be understood as the ability to influence or control the behaviour of others (‘power over’) (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). For many historical, social, economic and political reasons, some stakeholders are in a better position to impose their views in co-production processes. Ensuring ‘the right people are in the room’ and managing power dynamics so that everyone is heard is well-worn advice to researcher–practitioners of co-production. While necessary, it is likely not sufficient, however, to focus on what is happening in co-production events themselves. For example, the promise of generative forms of power (‘powerwith’ or ‘power-to’—see Avelino and Rotmans 2009; Hendriks 2009) can inspire actors to engage in co-production; but any belief that co-production

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will result in some actors trading off their ‘power-to’ for ‘power-with’—losing power—may hold them back from cooperating. Divergent expectations. Economic theory and related empirical explorations suggest that our expectations about the future trends and outcomes are key predictors of how humans will act in the future (Delavande et al. 2011). Co-production processes offer an opportunity to share information and other knowledge that will reduce uncertainties to the point where the group expectations converge—allowing for joint decisions—or clearly diverge, identifying critical blockages to agreement. Divergent expectations can be explained by a myriad of reasons even after information asymmetry has been improved: differing values and interests; variances in vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities; lack of trust; but also by the stickiness of beliefs that prevents participant-stakeholders from updating their expectations and reaching consensus, convergences, clumsy solutions or compromises in groups (Innes 2004; Thompson 2008; Wuppuluri and Doria 2018). Carefully designed co-production processes employ a wide variety of methodological approaches to manage the heterogeneity in participantstakeholder views, power dynamics and expectations, so that joint decisions can be made (Jäger et al. 2015; Kok et al. 2015; Malloy et al. 2017; Munda 2008; Scolobig et al. 2008; Späth et al. 2017). Methodological approaches differ in their assumptions, problem and solution framing, qualitative and quantitative data inputs/analysis, experts and participant-stakeholder tasks, and information flows, as well as in the way they address or clarify conflicts, and the extent to which they respect heterogeneity in stakeholder-values, or explicitly address complexity, uncertainty and trade-offs (Scolobig and Lilliestam 2016). Managing conflicts constructively in co-production is far from simple. Some issues may be strongly contested and remain as such throughout the process. However, this should not deter the researcher–practitioner from engaging with conflict. In collaborative decisions, differences need to be accommodated and ideally addressed to find a consensus, negotiated to find compromise or some alternative compromise solution—or at least clarified (Innes 2004; Lang et al. 2012; Lipset 1985; Scolobig et al. 2016). Yet, resolving conflicts is most of the time an impossible or too ambitious aim, not only in co-production but in any other type of decision-making processes. Rather than aiming at eliminating conflicts, researcher–practitioners should first and foremost understand and clarify what conflicts are really about (De Marchi 2003).

Understanding, Analysing and Addressing Conflicts in Co-production This section illustrates how researcher-practitioners are understanding, analysing and addressing conflicts with a focus on decision co-production. In order to do so, we identify five key issues: (i) understanding divergent and convergent stakeholder views; (ii) identifying power dynamics in problem and

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solution framing; (iii) translating different views into options for co-evaluation; (iv) reaching compromise solutions in contested policy terrains; and (v) coevaluating the co-production process. The concept of co-production first emerged in common-pool resource problems in the 1970s (Ostrom and Ostrom 1977) and was developed initially in the frame of public service delivery for education, security and health. However, it has been increasingly applied as a method in sustainability and in environmental governance (Miller and Wyborn 2018; Wyborn et al. 2019). We limit our cases to three approaches commonly applied in decision co-production in environmental resource governance and management: Participatory Multi-Criteria Analysis (Participatory MCA), Plural Rationality Approaches (PRAs) and Participatory Scenario-Based Approaches (SBA), all briefly described in Box 32.1.

Box 32.1 Participatory co-decision methods explored in the case studies (in Boxes 32.2 and 32.3)

Participatory Multi-Criteria Analysis (Participatory MCA) is a wellestablished decision support method used to reach a consensus regarding the ranking of different alternatives (Keeney and Raiffa 1976). MCA supports decision-makers to identify the most desirable options among a set of trade-offs between different alternatives and clarifies values associated with various outcomes (Munda 2004, 2008) by putting emphasis on criteria additional to traditional economic indicators. The alternatives are broken down into criteria, which are valued and/or weighted separately and then recombined and projected back onto one common scale, usually quantitative. Stakeholders may play a relevant role in the identification of alternatives, in the selection of criteria and their weighting, and/or in the evaluation process (Hämäläinen et al. 2001; Mustajoki et al. 2004). However, stakeholders’ perspectives are not always explicitly addressed in MCA and so it can prove insufficient when confronted with different definitions of the problem to be addressed or perspectives on alternatives to be integrated. In order to overcome these limitations, MCA is often combined with other social research methods allowing a better representation of stakeholders’ perspectives (De Marchi et al. 2000; Gregory and Wellman 2001; Kiker et al. 2005; Messner et al. 2006; Stirling 2006; Yatsalo et al. 2007). Plural Rationality Approaches (PRA) (also called cultural theory), seek compromise responses through explicit elicitation of stakeholder perspectives on the nature and causes of problems and effective resolutions to them (Thompson 2008). Plural rationality theory suggests there is a limited number of socially constructed stakeholder perspectives determined by attitudes, behaviours and interests (Douglas 1992; Thompson 2008). A hierarchical perspective is pro-control and insists

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that problems demand expertly planned solutions through government authorities, with their network of experts. The individualist perspective is pro-market and calls for de-regulation, the freedom to innovate and take risks, and for explicit recognition of tradeoffs among competing uses of resources. The egalitarian perspective is deeply skeptical of both the individualist notion of trade-offs and the claim that experts know best, especially when lives and other ‘sacred’ values are at issue. Finally, the fatalist perspective sees no possibility of affecting change for the better. These perspectives can be used as a point of reference in constructing, analysing and comparing different discourses (Dryzek 1997), usually elicited by means of social science methods (e.g. Samarasinghe and Strickert 2013) and often ‘translated’ into quantitative inputs to decision making (e.g. Ney and Thompson 1999). Given that discourses are shaped by the ways in which people organise, perceive and justify their social relations in that particular social context, they give insights into differences of views, power relations and dynamics in that situation and uncertainties blocking agreements or generating conflicts. PRAs seek compromise/clumsy solutions defined as outcomes, initially ‘hidden’ from all the participants, that enjoy a much higher level of overall consent than any of those in which just one set of actors manages to impose hegemony. The prerequisite for a clumsy solution, it follows, are accessibility (each perspective able to make itself heard) and responsiveness (each perspective engaged with, rather than dismissive of the others) (Verweij and Thompson 2006) Participatory Scenario-based Approaches (Participatory SBA): In scenario planning, a range of possible future situations are identified, highlighting the interactions between forces and elements in a system. In general, requirements for scenarios are that they are internally coherent, plausible and fundamentally distinct from one another. Typically the number of scenarios ranges from two to six, and they can be normative (identifying a desired future) or exploratory. However, most scenario analyses typically show that one scenario is cheaper or more profitable, implicitly recommending the adoption of that option (Bertram et al. 2015). In participatory SBA, the most important task is to link stakeholders’ perspectives with the scenario development. Stakeholders can engage by contributing in many ways, from qualitative visions and narratives to iteratively creating narratives, quantifying input data, ranking the finished scenarios and setting scenario boundary conditions together with the modellers (Gramberger et al. 2015; Jäger et al. 2015; Kok et al. 2015; Krütli et al. 2010). In most cases, the developed scenario changes, depending on the stakeholders’ evaluation of different parameters. Therefore iterative interactions between experts and stakeholders may be necessary in order to develop the final scenarios (Guivarch

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et al. 2017; Schmidt and Lilliestam 2015). Scenario analysis often stops with presenting the scenarios and their impacts, and does not include a decision-making process; however, participatory procedures can emphasise deliberation and consensus building around preferences (Innes and Boher 2010). Note that each of the above methods can be used in conjunction with the other, and indeed with other methods.

Engaging with Divergent Stakeholder Views The understanding and analysis of stakeholder views is, most often, only the starting point of co-production; but it is an important one. There is a vast literature in social and political sciences that provides tools and methods to identify which stakeholders are to be included in co-production (Miller et al. 2014) and how to analyse and represent stakeholders’ discourses/perspectives (e.g. Dryzek 1997). Different decision co-production approaches start from different assumptions on who has the right, knowledge and power to define the problem, the key issues to be addressed in solving the problem, what information is needed to tackle the problem, and who are the legitimate producers or holders of this knowledge. An additional undertaking to standard stakeholder analysis may be to articulate assumptions about stakeholder rationality adopted in different co-production methods because this has fundamental implications for the way conflicts are identified and addressed in later stages. This matters for methodological choices also. For example, approaches based on rational choice theory (e.g. multi criteria or scenario-based, or other approaches based on quantitative assessment) presume rationality is universal and stakeholder preferences are expected to change during the co-production process. In other approaches (e.g. plural rationality based/constructivist, usually based on qualitative or mixed method approaches) rationalities are multiple and substantially different, stakeholders do not change their preferences or become persuaded by the best argument, but rather strive to reach a compromise solution (Hood 1998; Thompson et al. 1990). Analyzing Power Dynamics Power distribution is a key factor in influencing the way conflicts emerge and are dealt with in co-production (e.g. Reed 2008; Stirling 2006; Thaler and Levin-Keitel 2016). As such, aiming for equality among participants is a key precondition for effective co-production in order to identify and allow for different voices to be heard. Power dynamics need to shift sufficiently so that new and additional perspectives and proposed responses are put on the table (e.g. Bréthaut et al. 2019).

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This is obvious but in practice it is a difficult task for researcher–practitioners to accomplish. Existing power dynamics and balances can be hidden, or are ingrained in local culture and other institutions, and will not change overnight within a process. Moreover, researcher–practitioners need to be aware that one group may impose its view by limiting, or even blocking other participants, thus hindering the entire process. Within a context of extreme power differentials, the success of co-production may require special designs, for example inclusion of bilateral meetings or specific rules for interaction. However, co-production does not—can not—presume congenial power relations; nor does it have to intend or even assume that such processes can resolve conflicts necessarily (Miller and Wyborn 2018; Ostrom 2007). However, not paying attention to power dynamics creates risks for the co-production process, and even missed opportunities to improve these or at least understand them better.

Box 32.2 Power dynamics in one participatory SBA for water–energy–food nexus risk planning in Cambodia (adapted from Bréthaut et al. 2019)

The Mekong Flooded Forest Landscape is a transboundary conservation landscape including Kratie and Stung Treng provinces in northeastern Cambodia. The region is experiencing rapid change as a result of new hydropower development, forest clearance for rubber plantation, river bed sediment mining, road network infrastructure and climate change impacts. The Linked Indicators for Vital Ecosystem Services (LIVES) project undertook a pilot case study of this resource conflict situation from January 2015 to December 2017 (see Fig. 32.1). This is a setting characterised by strong institutional fragmentation. A multistakeholder dialogue was conducted through iterative participatory scenario planning (using group system model building and system dynamics analysis) with national-level staff of the secretariat to the National Council on Sustainable Development, officials from Kratie and Stung Treng provincial governments, civil society organisations from national-level and the landscape, international governments based in Phnom Penh, and local representatives of those communities depending on farming and fishing for livelihoods and food. The participatory system dynamics modelling method was chosen specifically to co-produce a new level of understanding and agreement on problem framings by participants, as have been reported by others working with similar methods in resource co-management contexts (Hodgson 2012; Howarth and Monasterolo 2017; Voinov et al. 2016). During the process some strong agreements on other types of problems that were not normally discussed in this setting emerged—for example, severe water scarcity and concerns over future drought; fish

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Fig. 32.1 The Mekong Flooded Forest Landscape. WWF Cambodia 2016, produced for the LIVES project

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stock degradation already happening before any major dam developments were put in place; and a lack of satisfaction with the current procedures by which local and national development planning is achieved because it lacks a systemic approach. Participants reported that the systems thinking methodology enabled different types of actors to get involved in policy discussions in a new way, with the result that the most urgent priority for action was to change the way investment and budget planning for commune-level development plans were conducted. Yet, even with wide agreement about the need to adopt a new approach to resource planning and management, including informally from highlevel policy makers in the provincial government, they could not reach any formal decision on changing procedures without national-level agreement. A qualitative analysis of partner interviews, workshop meeting reports and stakeholder evaluations revealed several power-related enabling conditions contributing to this mixed outcome. On the one hand, the co-production processes influenced pre-existing power dynamics, temporarily shifting them to bring different stakeholder views to the fore and into the scenario analysis. On the other hand, institutional path dependencies clearly limited the effects of co-production on changing power imbalances in a top-down jurisdictional hierarchy. At the end of the project, one partner reflected: ‘stakeholders still cannot say honestly [to others] what were their contributions to build those system dynamic models because they are afraid of the top guy. …mostly they keep silent because afraid to say this was built by us, and this is what we suggest to the top level to do’. This mixed outcome produced a minor conflict within the co-production project team, with civil society partners reporting dissatisfaction that the pilot had to finish just when there was an opportunity to follow through and generate policy change. Using power as an analytical lens shows the diversity of triggers pushing away or moving towards integration outcomes that could have been better considered in the co-production process design and execution: anticipating such structural barriers and involving the key decision-maker earlier and extending follow up in the project timeframes to take the local co-produced decision to (a since receptive) Ministry of Interior. It also showed the power dynamics within co-production partnerships when it comes to determining funding and time resource allocations.

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Translating Views into Options for Co-evaluation Solution framing is a critical step in which stakeholder priorities, values and interests must converge towards a compromise or clumsy solution or a consensus about a desirable outcome (Alford 2014) suggests that a critical part of the process of anticipating conflict consists in paying careful attention to who gets what value, and who creates the value-added. However, much depends on who gets to frame solutions for evaluation, who designs the evaluation framework and who trusts the information supporting the evaluation. Co-producing decisions in case of complex problems often means that it is necessary to move from qualitative views into technical policy options, e.g. to compare and contrast the costs and benefits of different pathways, or to co-design formal policy plans. In doing so, a challenge may be to guarantee an equal and fair representation of all views, while still narrowing in on a feasible number of options to be evaluated. This includes stakeholders that may not have the power, time, economic resources or knowledge to get their views represented (e.g. included in cost-benefit analyses) during co-production processes. In this respect, one of the main differences between the co-production approaches discussed here are the methods each uses to frame solutions for evaluation, for example, expert analysis compared to facilitated dialogue methods. In participatory MCA approaches, determining alternatives that frame the choices before the group is the backbone of the approach, and these alternatives are usually identified by experts. Stakeholders’ preferences are used to produce criteria for evaluating and comparing the alternatives (usually weighted). The best alternative is, again, usually identified by experts weighing up different preferences and trade-offs using pairwise comparison or other methods. Experts may then frame the solution by explicating and/or evaluating the impacts of different options and facilitating dialogue among stakeholders about these. This approach emphasises the need (for experts and stakeholders) to agree on assumptions with a focus on rationalising decisions by clearly identifying criteria and alternatives. Clearly some decisions must be made during the process of criteria selection regarding the quantity and quality of criteria that are relevant in the view of the stakeholders involved. A selection process to reduce complexity and heterogeneity of different stakeholder perspectives is always necessary. Consequently, the selected criteria inevitably represent the views and priorities of some stakeholders better than others and this generates some power imbalances in the solution identification (See Scolobig and Lilliestam 2016).

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Box 32.3 Co-design of options for risk mitigation using plural rationality theory (adapted from Linnerooth-Bayer et al. 2016; Scolobig et al. 2016)

With the escalating costs of landslides, the challenge for local authorities is to develop institutional arrangements for landslide risk management that are viewed as efficient, feasible and fair by those affected. This box reports on a co-production process for selecting landslide risk mitigation measures in the town of Nocera Inferiore in southern Italy. Experts co-produced risk mitigation options based on their specialised knowledge taking account of local knowledge and values by directly coupling different stakeholder views/discourses with option design. Drawing on the theory of plural rationality and based on a literature review, interviews and a public questionnaire, stakeholder discourses were elicited on the landslides risk problem and its solution. Armed with the discourses and in close interaction with stakeholders, experts provided a range of technical mitigation options, each within a given budget constraint. For example the option entitled ‘Careful stewardship of the mountains’ reflected the views of some stakeholders, primarily members of local NGOs. This view can be summarised as follows: ‘Expensive structural measures will only aggravate the ecological problems and are not necessary. Moreover, they are problematic due to the complex mix of authorities in charge. Rather, active measures (including naturalistic engineering works) can do the job. Authorities should consider the creation of a natural park at the toe of the slope to reduce urbanization in the area. A network of walking paths should be created so that local residents can enjoy the mountain areas and monitor the territory at the same time. Also, small-scale organic farming on the mountain and better management of the public and private forests could be encouraged. Improved monitoring of the slopes and warning systems are essential, and the residents, themselves, can be very good at knowing when to evacuate’. The expert team translated this perspective into a mitigation package that relied on passive measures in the form of small water retention tanks, extensive active measures, including forestation, and a warning system. Specifically, the expert team constructed the following package: • Passive structural control measures in the form of small-size water tanks located in the piedmont area; • Active structural mitigation measures, including sheet piling and natural engineering measures like channel lining and vegetated gabions; • Forestation with a belt of oak trees located at the toe of the slope;

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Fig. 32.2 Option ‘careful stewardship of the mountains’. Map produced for the Safeland project by University of Salerno in 2016

• Monitoring/warning system, including a territorial survey (see Fig. 32.2); source (Linnerooth-Bayer et al. 2016; Scolobig et al. 2016). These options were subsequently deliberated in a series of five workshops in which experts interacted directly with stakeholders/citizens with the intent of reaching compromise recommendations for landslides risk mitigation. Citizens worked in like-minded groups to identify priorities that were subsequently discussed to reach a compromise solution. The provision of multiple co-produced policy options enhanced stakeholder deliberation by respecting legitimate differences in values and worldviews. In participatory scenario-based knowledge approaches, data from stakeholders are often quantified and in many cases included in model runs. This is done in different ways. In some cases, stakeholder perceptions of likely/unlikely storylines are elicited, which are then translated by the modellers themselves into quantitative scenarios. The range of possible futures is developed jointly by stakeholders and experts or the experts translate the stakeholder stories to model input data themselves. In these cases, to varying degrees, the stakeholders become indirect sources of data (as the experts still help or do the quantification of qualitative statements themselves). This link between qualitative stakeholder narratives and their quantification (or monetisation) into meaningful input data for models and scenario construction remains the ‘soft spot’. Yet, the translation from qualitative views into quantitative socio-technical options often allows clear identification and representation of the main differences and points of friction that may impede

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the reaching of a consensus or a compromise in the final stages of the co-production process. Reaching Compromise Solutions in Contested Policy Terrains Reaching a compromise, a consensus or an acceptable outcome in decision co-production processes are most often the biggest challenge of all, especially in case of conflicts. There is a long tradition of studies on decision analytical techniques, which span from negotiation theory to consensus building paradigms, aiming at finding pathways to reach a final agreement on contested policy issues, e.g. (Jäger et al. 2015; Kok et al. 2015; Munda 2008; Thompson 2008). Different disciplines—e.g. management, political sciences, social sciences, etc.—provide completely different theoretical and methodological approaches on how to reach a compromise. However, there is limited research focus on how to enhance acceptance of a decision outcome in case of strong conflicts. This includes, for example, research on how priority actions are identified and how knowledge co-production can better support the forging of a compromise. A better understanding is particularly needed of how to address possible conflicts in the final critical phases of a knowledge co-production process. This poses a number of methodological challenges, related, for example, to the design of experiments to compare and contrast how different knowledge co-production methodologies address stakeholder value conflicts to reach compromise solutions. Ongoing Evaluation Ongoing evaluation of co-production is one tool to prevent, surface and address conflicts. Numerous criteria for evaluating the quality of participatory processes exist (Rowe and Frewer 2000; Webler and Tuler 2000). However, criteria for evaluating public participation and co-production do not completely overlap. There are few authors addressing this issue explicitly. For example, Bremer and Meisch (2017) identify a typology of primarily qualitative criteria to evaluate co-production in climate science through a number of lenses, namely interactional (i.e. how did the process evolve with institutions and wider social, political and economic systems?), iterative (i.e. did the process promote consultative interaction between climate science providers and users, for more useful information?), extended science (i.e. does the process integrate stakeholders in extended modes of knowledge generation?), public service outcomes (i.e. have public services been co-produced?), institutional outcomes (i.e. has adaptive capacity been built in governance institutions ?), social learning (i.e. has social learning been fostered?) and empowerment lenses (i.e. have traditional knowledge systems for governance been empowered?). However, unless processes build in deliberate reflexive practices to operationalise these principles during co-production—and not simply to evaluate the quality at the end—opportunities are missed to surface and address conflicts

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constructively. Table 32.1 provides an overview of some key criteria and a suggested evaluation framework to anticipate, surface and address conflicts in co-production. Finally, the vast majority of co-production approaches aim at driving innovation and change in existing practices. Yet, the co-evaluation of the short, medium and long term social impacts of these processes is far from straightforward and it poses several challenges, especially in the case of conflicts before, during or after the co-production process. Good outcomes and impacts for one group of stakeholders may be bad for another group. Also in knowledge co-production processes there are winners and losers and power dynamics strongly influence social impacts. A challenge is the understanding of the relationship between processes and their impacts on actual decision-making. The notions of ‘impact’ are often operationalised by premising linear models of the decision-making processes, according to which decision-makers use the results of knowledge co-production to make decisions. Thus a process is successful only if the results are directly implemented in the case under study. This may be misguided. Arguably, the actual impacts of these processes are visible only in the long term and they are extremely difficult to measure and quantify for several reasons, e.g. because it is extremely difficult to measure the potential to mobilise stakeholders or to foster long-term social changes. Finally, specific attention should be dedicated not only to the complex pathways to define and measure impact but also to the ethical implications of each of these pathways, which may differ greatly.

Conclusion and Future Outlook Conflicts between stakeholders engaging in co-production tend to be complex and persistent. In this chapter we maintain that this subject has received insufficient attention, perhaps because of a suspected bias towards reporting successful co-production or because of the difficulties in clearly identifying the differences between conflicts in co-production vs. other forms of decisionmaking. We identify three intertwined elements that may let conflicts arise: differences in views, including values, beliefs and knowledge types; uneven distribution of resources, status and power between groups; and divergent expectations about the outcomes. Managing conflicts in co-production is far from simple. Some issues may be strongly contested and remain as such throughout the process. The main purpose of co-production should not necessarily be to eliminate conflicts, but rather to clarify what they are really about. In order to do so, we focus on how different methodological approaches (namely plural rationality, multicriteria and scenario-based) go about addressing conflicts and we also present the results of some selected case studies. In this last section we suggest some pathways for future research on this topic.

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Table 32.1 Evaluation framework of criteria to anticipate, surface and address conflicts in co-production

Anticipate

Criteria

Description

Clear and agreed objectives

Clear objectives are formulated which are agreed by all participants Stakeholders are involved from the beginning of the project and are included in all stages of co-production (from concept development to implementation) A legitimate co-production process is perceived as valid, credible and authoritative. The process is open, focused on co-produced knowledge and create ownership Everybody who might be affected by the decision or is interested in the process should be involved A learning process takes place between participants with different kinds of knowledge and perspectives but also between stakeholders and experts Stakeholders have equal power in discussions as well as identical opportunities to participate. The atmosphere is dominated by trust and respect Facilitator/s possess unbiased and independent approach and skills to foster consensus among stakeholders The process is flexible and can be adapted to changing circumstances and new insights Participants have the power to influence the process, decisions and outcomes. They need to have a certain capacity as well as opportunities to influence The process is internally and externally transparent and all participants understand how the co-production and decision making processes work and interact

Early, continuous and active stakeholder involvement

Legitimacy and ownership

Representativeness

Learning

Surface/address

Fairness and equality

Highly skilled facilitation

Flexibility

Participants power to influence

Transparency

Source Based on Fohlmeister et al. (2019); Reed (2008); Rowe and Frewer (2000); Smith (2009); Verschuere et al. (2012); and Webler and Tuler (2000)

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Social Media and Big Social Science Data New technologies, especially social media and big data, represent one of the main opportunities and challenges for knowledge co-production and for understanding conflicts. By using these new technologies it is nowadays possible to reach online a number of people that was simply unimaginable a decade ago. There is a need to understand better the potential of social media as catalysts of stakeholder engagement and the use of big data to analyse and synthesise stakeholders concerns, needs, opinions, perspectives and conflicts (see, for example, Ilieva and McPherson 2018). On the one side, the potential of new technologies to reach and get data from representative samples of the wider population is enormous. On the other side, it is still unclear how to collect and analyse the enormous amount of qualitative data available online (e.g. in online groups discussing climate change issues, in blogs or via Facebook, Twitter. etc.). New developments in computational linguistics, machine learning combined with the availability of extremely large natural language datasets have created an enormous potential to collect data on attitudes, views and behaviours online. These models (e.g. Mikolov 2013) use language data collected online (e.g. on Google News, Corpus or specific websites/blogs) to glean knowledge about, for example, probability, factual and social judgements (Bhatia 2017). As we highlighted in previous sections, engaging with divergent stakeholders’ views is the starting point to understanding conflicts in co-production. Thus, it is critical to find better ways to use social media to analyse and include these views in co-production. Synergies Between Approaches Knowledge co-production processes face difficult trade-offs across social, institutional, economic and ecological value dimensions at multiple scales. Carefully designed inclusive processes employing the approaches described above (see Box 32.1) respect stakeholder value heterogeneity and explicitly address trade-offs and uncertainty. Yet, as described above, they do it in different ways and starting from different assumptions. In order to address conflicts in co-production more effectively, there is a need to classify better existing approaches, to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and also possible synergies between different methods. Moreover guidelines for the selection of one particular approach according to the process goals, specific constraints (e.g. time, budget, logistics) and local contexts (e.g. presence of power asymmetries) need to be identified. These should be all regarded as starting points to develop improved theories and methodologies for addressing conflicts in co-production.

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Coalition Formation Processes Little research has focused on the social and power dynamics emerging during knowledge co-production processes (see, for example, Bréthaut et al. 2019). The inclusion of some stakeholders may have adverse effects through slowing down decision-making, or facilitating the preferred solutions of already powerful actors, rather than fostering fairness in decision-making. There is limited research on how stakeholders form coalitions in coproduction and why, whether these coalitions change during the process, and what are the driving factors for these changes. Trust between stakeholders and coalitions may be an important influential variable, but it always needs time and engagement to be developed. In a context of trust, stakeholders’ positive orientations and expectations may have an influence on the entire process and constitute a ground for the legitimisation of the decisions undertaken. Finally, it is important to better understand if the formation of coalitions contributes in conflicts being addressed or not. Coalitions may impose a view but they may, on the other hand, also contribute in reducing the range of alternatives and in addressing conflicts. Acknowledgements Anna Scolobig’s contribution was in part supported by the PHUSICOS project (EU H2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement No. 776681). The landslide risk mitigation casework was supported by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme through the grant to the budget of the SafeLand Project, Grant agreement: 226479. The LIVES project casework was funded by the Nomis Foundation and the MAVA Foundation, and conducted in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

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PART X

Future Research Agenda

CHAPTER 33

Experimental Methods for Investigating Co-production Sinah Kang and Gregg G. Van Ryzin

Introduction Co-production has been studied from many angles, as this volume attests, including case studies of co-production initiatives, efforts at classifying various co-production activities, the role of co-production in different policy sectors, cross-cultural differences in co-production, and stages in the co-creation and co-production process. But in addition to these important descriptive and definitional questions, there remain important causal questions about coproduction of at least two kinds. First, there is the question of the causes of co-production—what factors or influences cause people (or groups) to engage in co-production. For example, are people driven to co-produce because of service failures, social norms, a sense of altruism or perhaps even financial incentives? Second, there is the question of the effects of co-production—in other words, what effects on people or communities stem from co-production. For example, does co-production lead to improvements in the quality of public services, and does it lead people to be more attached to their communities or more trusting of government? Questions of cause and effect can be approached with various research methods, but it is widely agreed in the social sciences that experimental methods provide the most rigorous evidence of causation (Rosenbaum 2017; Shadish et al. 2002). Thus, it is not surprising that experiments have begun to S. Kang · G. G. Van Ryzin (B) Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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be used to examine various issues in public policy and administration (James et al. 2017) and, specifically, questions about the causes and effects of coproduction (Andersen et al. 2017). In this chapter, we begin with a summary of the logic and design of experiments as a method of research, given that they remain a relatively new and sometimes misunderstood approach to studying co-production. Next, we provide a brief review of published experimental studies of co-production to assess the types of experiments, topics and other features of this emerging line of research. Finally, we conclude the chapter with some issues and ideas for future experimental research on co-production.

An Experimental Approach to Studying Co-production Co-production projects or initiatives may be described as experiments or experimental in the sense of trying something new, but the term experiment or more precisely randomized experiment means something more precise when describing an empirical research strategy. In a randomized experiment, researchers randomly assign people (or other units) to some kind of intervention, manipulation or treatment in order to observe its effects. This treatment group, as it is called, is then compared to the remaining control group of people (or other units) that represents what would have happened to the treatment group in the absence of the treatment (and hence referred to as the counterfactual ). Comparing the outcomes across the treatment and control groups provides an estimate of the causal effect of the treatment. Figure 33.1 illustrates the basic setup of a randomised experiment. Experiments can become more complex by the addition of two or more treatment groups, testing several treatments (factors) and their interaction, and by adding additional measurements of the outcome before or after the intervention. Experiments can also involve multiple outcomes, and researchers can also examine interactions of the treatment with various characteristics of the people (or units) in the experiment. But still the basic logic remains the same: by intervening to change or manipulate a treatment group, with a statistically equivalent control group reserved for comparison, the researcher can probe

Fig. 33.1 Basic design of a randomised experiment

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for and observe a causal effect. It should be noted that sometimes (indeed, fairly often) experiments find no causal effect (a null finding), which suggests the lack of causation. But still this provides important evidence: after all, we need to know the truth about ineffective treatments as well. To illustrate how these ideas might be applied to the causes of coproduction, we could imagine an intervention that is some kind of communication or incentive designed to encourage people to co-produce. For example, say we send a letter to some households (randomly assigned) notifying them that a high percentage of their neighbours recycle their bottles and cans. We can then observe if this letter about a social norm, relative to a control group of households that do not get the letter, encourages co-production (perhaps measured as the volume of bottles and cans each household sets out for recycling). In this kind of study, co-production is the outcome of interest. Or applying these ideas to the effects of co-production, we could imagine a programme in which upper-level students in a secondary school (randomly chosen) participate in an initiative to tutor first-year students in math. We can then observe how this involvement in a co-production effort, relative to a control group of upper-level students who were not asked to help with tutoring, leads to feelings of attachment to the school and perhaps better academic performance (as measured by test scores). In this example, co-production is the intervention or treatment. Randomised experiments can be conducted in a lab, in the field, or embedded in a survey. In a lab experiment, researchers bring participants to a university or other location where they can be observed conducting a task or exercise in controlled conditions. For example, Norton et al. (2012) recruited students to a lab to observe how their involvement in building an object (an Ikea box, an origami animal or a Lego figure) influenced the monetary value they placed on the object (the amount they were willing to bid for it), compared to a control group that received the objects already assembled. The findings have implications for co-production: those in the treatment group were willing to pay over 50% more for the object they built themselves, compared to what those in the control group bid on an identical but already-assembled object. Simply put, they valued an object more if they helped produce it. Like many laboratory experiments, this one was artificial, stylised, and involved only students, but nevertheless it provided a controlled environment in which to carefully manipulate conditions and observe their effects. A field experiment is one in which an intervention or treatment is tested in the real-world. For example, Jakobsen and Andersen (2013) experimentally tested an early education intervention (a kit containing books and other learning materials) designed to encourage immigrant parents in Danish public schools to help their children acquire language proficiency. Compared to a control group of immigrant children whose parents did not receive the kit of books and other materials, the children in the treatment were much less likely to require special remedial classes. Note that, as in many field experiments,

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the outcome is measured by administrative records that are collected as part of regular school procedures and thus independent of the researchers (thus referred to as unobtrusive measures ). The parents were also likely unaware that the kit of learning materials was part of any special experiment. These are some of the key characteristics of field experiments: they involve naturalistic interventions, real-world settings and unobtrusive measures of behaviour. In this way, field experiments provide some of the most relevant experimental evidence for public policy and administrative practice. A survey experiment, as the name suggests, is an experiment embedded in a survey instrument, most typically an online survey, because it can be easily programmed to randomly vary the information or content shown to respondents. For example, Kang and Van Ryzin (2019) designed a series of experiments in an online survey of US adults to test if something like the ‘Ikea effect’ observed in the lab experiment by Norton et al. (2012) might apply to co-production of public services. In one experiment, they randomly assigned survey respondents to receive descriptions of US federal agencies in which a co-production cue was mentioned. In another experiment, they randomly assigned respondents to recall the ways in which co-production plays a role in the work of local government agencies (by writing about it). The idea was to test if such priming of awareness of co-production led citizens to view public agencies and services more favourably. In both experiments, compared to control groups that did not receive the co-production cue (in the case of the federal agencies) or the co-production recall task (in the case of the local government agencies), there was no significant increase in trust of government (although the effects were in the expected, positive direction). These findings suggest that the Ikea effect may work differently in the realm of public services, although it could also be that it is simply more difficult to manipulate co-production in a survey experiment. As with many survey experiments, the advantage of this study was its large, nationwide sample of adults with characteristics similar to the US population. The disadvantage of survey experiments, however, is that they tend to be artificial and the treatments are often limited to short statements or tasks that can be carried out as part of responding to an online survey. Finally, it should be noted that studies of co-production can involve what are known as quasi-experiments or natural experiments. A quasi-experiment refers to a situation that resembles a traditional randomised experiment (see Fig. 33.1) but in which assignment of the intervention is not fully random for either practical or ethical reasons (Shadish et al. 2002). For example, it may be possible to assign a co-production initiative only at the neighbourhood level, such as a neighbourhood watch program to reduce crime, but of course not randomly assign households to neighbourhoods (for obvious practical and ethical reasons). But if a good comparison (matched) neighbourhood can be identified and included in the study, something like an experiment

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can be created. A natural experiment occurs when something unplanned or unintended happens in the world in a way that resembles a randomised experiment. For example, Knutsson et al. (2013) took advantage of the gradual (as-if random) rollout in Sweden of new recycling machines that provided people with the option of donating their returned deposit to charity. Compared to the older machines, however, the new machines collected much less recyclable material, suggesting that the option to donate returned deposits to charity seems to have had the perverse effect of causing people to avoid recycling. Clever researchers should keep their eyes out for such natural, random variations in the world that can help shed light on the causes and effects of co-production.

Review of Published Experiments About Co-production As mentioned earlier, the field of public management has witnessed an increase in the use of experimental methods to investigate various topics. In this section, we present a review of the characteristics of experimental studies in public management and related fields that focus on the co-production of public services. Using the Web of Science database, with a cross-check through Google Scholar, we conducted a keyword search for ‘co-production’ and ‘experiment’, as well as ‘public participation’ (an often-used synonym for co-production) and ‘experiment’, appearing in the titles, abstracts or keywords (including both author-picked and computer-generated keywords) of articles in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) journals for all available years (through October 2019, the time of our search). Our search returned a total of 97 initial articles. For the purpose of this review, however, we selected only articles that discuss co-production of public services, including general government services, education, environment, policing and other public services, and thus excluded 60 articles that involved private goods or services or that did not use a randomised experiment as the method of research. In the end, this left us with 37 articles from public administration and related fields that were appropriate for the purposes of our review. (See Appendix for the complete list of articles included in the final analysis). Our review focused on trends over time, disciplines and journals, policy areas, the type of experiment, and whether co-production was an independent or dependent variable in the study. Trends Over Time To begin with, our review revealed that the use of experimental methods to study co-production of public services is a fairly recent trend that has arisen only over the past decade. Indeed, only four among 37 articles reviewed were published prior to 2010. This trend may reflect the fact that experimental methods in general have relatively recently become more widely applied to various topics in public policy and administration. But this trend may also

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reflect the fact that the concept of co-production itself has seen a marked resurgence of interest in recent years among scholars and practitioners (Nabatchi et al. 2017). Another interesting trend apparent in our review is that survey experiments have been used substantially more than other types of experiments to study co-production of public services during this time. This may be attributable to the rise of online survey platforms like Qualtrics that not only allow researchers to recruit more readily a group of participants for their research but also to design and implement more easily an experiment, including randomising text, images and other information, within the environment of an online questionnaire. Disciplines and Journals Fourteen out of 37 articles in our review were published in public administration journals, including Public Administration Review (PAR), Public Management Review (PMR), Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), International Public Management Journal (IPMJ) and Journal of Behavioral Public Administration (JBPA). Other articles were published within related disciplines such as environmental studies, planning, criminology, as well as interdisciplinary journals such as Systems Research and Behavioral Science and Social Science and Medicine. In many cases, however, similar topics have been studied across different disciplines. For example, researchers using experimental methods have examined factors affecting recycling behaviour, the most widely studied form of environmental co-production, and published their results in public administration journals (Riccucci et al. 2016) as well as in environmental studies journals (Bernstad et al. 2013). This tendency to publish in both general public administration journals and more specialist journals is also the case for other policy areas such as policing and education. Policy Areas As Fig. 33.2 shows, the most frequently studied policy area in the experimental co-production literature was the environment, followed by planning, education, health and policing. Studies that we categorised as ‘general’ in our review include those that do not have a specific policy or service area of focus (Fledderus 2015; Kang and Van Ryzin 2019) as well as those that have examined co-production in government decision-making processes, including local budgeting (Herian et al. 2012), public meetings (Hock et al. 2013) and political participation (Hjortskov et al. 2018). When the environment is the policy focus, experimental studies of co-production have mainly investigated various factors affecting people’s recycling behaviours, as measured by either the willingness to recycle or the actual amount of waste produced, with a few studies that have tested the consequences of co-producing environmental solutions (Li et al. 2018). Some other common themes that appeared in experimental studies of co-production of public services include the effects of participation

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Fig. 33.2 Policy areas

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Fig. 33.3 Types of experiment

in consensus-based planning processes (regarding local land use, for example), the effects of parental involvement in children’s education and the effects of engaging citizens or patients in their own healthcare. The Type of Experiment When it comes to the type of experiment used to study co-production of public services, as Fig. 33.3 reveals, field experiments and survey experiments were used most frequently, followed by quasi- or natural experiments. Lab experiments have been used relatively infrequently to study co-production. It

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should be noted, however, that many of the field experiments in our review did not involve the characteristic use of unobtrusive outcome measures. A few did use unobtrusive measures, for example school records in the study by Jakobsen and Andersen (2013) were employed to evaluate a co-production intervention to boost language learning. But in most field experiments in our review, it was more common for the researchers to use self-reported perceptual or behavioural outcomes measured by a survey after an intervention was implemented in a real-world setting. In a study about truancy control, for example, Mazerolle et al. (2017) examined the effect of actively engaging parents and their truanting children in a group conference dialogue on students’ willingness to attend school (rather than using the actual attendance rates documented by school teachers or administrators as their outcome measure). Measuring behavioural intentions, so-called ‘willingness’ variables, rather than actual behaviours was also very common among the studies of coproduction that involved a survey experiment. Furthermore, in the survey experiments where co-production is the independent variable, it is usually awareness of co-production—rather than actual involvement in co-producing public services—that was manipulated, typically by using primes or cues. In contrast, studies that involve quasi- or natural experiments, as well as lab experiments, tend to more often examine actual participation in co-production behaviours. For example, Factor (2018) implemented a quasi-experimental design using matched pairs of localities in Israel and found a significant reduction in traffic violations in the localities where the solutions to local traffic problems were co-produced by local public officials and residents together through a series of deliberative forums. A small increase in violations was observed, by contrast, in the control localities where traffic enforcement continued as usual. Co-production as Independent or Dependent Variable As discussed in the introduction, researchers have studied both the causes and the effects of co-production of public services using various experimental methods. As Fig. 33.4 shows, we found in our review that there were more studies that examined co-production as an independent variable (thus focusing on the effects of co-production) than there were studies that examined co-production as a dependent variable (thus focusing on the causes of co-production). In studies where co-production is the independent variable (intervention or treatment), co-production effects were tested primarily on citizen perceptions such as satisfaction, trust, policy support, etc., but also, in rarer cases, on more behavioral outcomes. The findings from the majority of these studies show that co-production leads to positive outcomes such as increased perceptions of governmental fairness (Herian et al. 2012), increased compliance with traffic regulations (Factor 2018) and decreased truancy (Mazerolle et al. 2017). A few studies, however, have found no

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Fig. 33.4 Co-production as independent variable (IV) or dependent variable (DV)

statistically significant—or even slightly negative—effects of co-production on outcomes such as trust in or satisfaction with public services or the service providers (Fledderus 2015; Kang and Van Ryzin 2019). In studies where co-production—or willingness to co-produce—is the dependent variable, various factors, including financial rewards, informational resources, nudging strategies and performance cues were examined as possible causes of co-production. The results from these studies show that financial rewards, in general, are not effective (or at least not costeffective) in promoting co-production behaviours (Voorberg et al. 2018; Yang and Ott 2016), whereas some psychological factors such as recognition, encouragement, nudging and symbolic representation have been shown to have significant positive effects on co-production (Bernstad et al. 2013; Riccucci et al. 2016; Yang and Ott 2016). For example, Riccucci et al. (2016) found that having more female names of public officials quoted in an announcement about a hypothetical recycling initiative increased female survey respondents’ willingness to recycle (co-produce). Lastly, in three studies where co-production served as both independent and dependent variable, the authors tested whether involvement in one form of co-production may lead to an increase in another form of co-production (Cavalcanti et al. 2010; Cotterill et al. 2009). For example, Cavalcanti et al. (2010) found that citizens who participated in local deliberation about the management of a fishery resource showed increased willingness to contribute to the implementation of the discussed measures.

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Issues and Ideas for Future Research on Co-production Having reviewed the basic logic of experimental methods and their application to the study of co-production, including a review of the experimental coproduction literature, we conclude with a discussion of a few issues and ideas for future research. To begin with, we hope that our overview of experimental design and our review of published co-production experiments provides some encouragement to students and scholars of co-production who may want to employ experimental methods in their own research. It is noteworthy that the experimental investigation of co-production is on the rise, particularly in recent years, and that such studies have been published in many of the field’s top journals. These experiments have been varied in their focus and promising in their results, which bodes well for the future of experimental research on co-production. That said, there are some gaps in the existing literature as well as issues for future research along these lines. To begin with, the experimental research on co-production has focused primarily on environmental issues, such as recycling, and on citizen participation in general government and planning functions. These issues are important, to be sure, but they represent only a narrow slice of public goods and services in which co-production plays an important role. Relatively fewer experimental studies have examined co-production in the important areas of education, health and policing. Moreover, there are additional policy areas for co-production research such as social care, transportation, housing, arts and culture, and others that have yet to be examined more fully using experimental methods. In addition, we found relatively few studies that measured actual coproduction behaviours, with the focus more often on co-production cues (as causes) or behavioural intentions (as effects). Relatedly, we found relatively few lab experiments, which importantly provide a way to more directly manipulate and closely observe real behaviours, as in the work of Norton et al. (2012) on the Ikea effect. Another way to focus more on actual co-production behaviours and to enhance realism is to look for quasi- and natural experiments that involve exogenous change in real-world policies or administrative practices that may shed light on the causes or effects of co-production. These could be a change in laws or rules, enhanced access to information, or the rollout of a new programmme that affects one jurisdiction but not another comparable jurisdiction, for example. Although sometimes not fully randomised or ‘true’ experiments, such quasi-experimental situations still involve much of the core logic of the experimental method.

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With respect to the causes of co-production, the focus of existing experimental research has been mostly on individually targeted micro-level cues, information and incentives. Less attention has been paid to the group- or meso- level institutional designs and structures of the kind that inspired much of the original theorising and empirical work on co-production by the Ostroms and their collaborators (Parks et al. 1981; Tarko 2016). This perhaps gets at a key limitation of the experimental approach to co-production: the need to randomly assign individuals to treatments limits the focus to factors and conditions that are inherently individual rather than collective in nature. Thus, it may well be that some of the important institutional designs and structures that shape co-production extend beyond the reach of experimental methods as a tool of investigation. Or alternatively, it may be necessary for experimental researchers interested in co-production to devise game theory experiments or to identify natural experiments that can possibly probe the more institutional-level factors influencing the co-production of public goods and services. Lastly, now that we have some empirical evidence to claim that coproduction may not always lead to positive outcomes, it would be interesting for future studies to employ experimental methods to examine potential downsides associated with co-producing public services. Although it is intuitively appealing to advocate for all forms of public participation, including coproduction, future research on the topic should not automatically assume or hypothesise that co-production always leads to added value. Moreover, it is important to know why or in what circumstances co-production may lead to negative consequences or receive less support from the public than more direct ways of public service delivery. In other words, it is important for future experimental research on co-production to probe for social, cultural or political moderating factors that shape how people perceive or behave in response to the co-production of public services in specific policy areas and governance contexts.

Appendix

2007

2019

2011

2013

2016

2012

Schively

Factor

Cuppen

Smith

Edwards, Anstey, Kelly and Hopkinson

Jakobsen

A quantitative analysis of consensus building in local environmental review A quasi-experiment testing a public participation process for designing and implementing an enforcement program among minorities A quasi-experimental evaluation of learning in a stakeholder dialogue on bio-energy Adaptive participation in forest planning contingent on a hypothetical large-scale forest disturbance An innovation in curriculum content and delivery of cancer education within undergraduate nurse training in the UK. What impact does this have on the knowledge, attitudes and confidence in delivering cancer care Can government initiatives increase citizen co-production? Results of a randomized field experiment

Year

Author (Last Name)

Article

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

European Journal of Oncology Nursing

Forest Science

Research Policy

Journal of Experimental Criminology

Journal of Planning Education and Research

Journal

Education

Health

Planning

DV

IV

DV

IV

IV

Policing

Environment

IV

IV/DV

Planning

Policy area

Field

(continued)

Quasi-experiment

Field

Quasi-experiment

Quasi-experiment

Quasi-experiment

Type of experiment

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2019

2013 2019

2013

2016

2015

2013

Jo and Nabatchi

Jakobsen and Andersen

Kang and Van Ryzin

Knutsson, Martinsson and Wollbrant

Johnson, Bell and Teisl

Fledderus

Bernstad, Jansen and Aspegren

Co-producing healthcare: Individual-level impacts of engaging citizens to develop recommendations for reducing diagnostic error Co-production and equity in public service delivery Co-production and trust in government: Evidence from survey experiments Do people avoid opportunities to donate? A natural field experiment on recycling and charitable giving. Does reading scenarios of future land use changes affect willingness to participate in land use planning Does user co-production of public service delivery increase satisfaction and trust? Evidence from a vignette experiment Door-stepping as a strategy for improved food waste recycling behaviour: Evaluation of a full-scale experiment

Year

Author (Last Name)

Article

(continued)

Resources Conservation and Recycling

International Journal of Public Administration

Land Use Policy

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Public Management Review

Public Administration Review

Public Management Review

Journal

Environment

General

Planning

Environment

General

Education

Health

Policy area

DV

IV

DV

DV

IV

IV

IV

IV/DV

Field

Survey

Survey

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Survey

Field

Field

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Public Administration Review

2015

International Public Management Journal

2018

Voorberg, Jilke, Tummers and Bekkers

Systems Research and Behavioral Science

Thomsen and Jakobsen

2019

Stave, Dwyer and Turner

Social Science and Medicine

International Public Management Journal

2007

Abelson, Forest, Eyles, Casebeer, Martin and Mackean

American Journal of Political Science

Journal

Andersen, Nielsen and Thomsen 2018

2018

Hjortskov, Andersen and Jakobsen

Encouraging political voices of underrepresented citizens through co-production: Evidence from a randomised field trial Examining the role of context in the implementation of a deliberative public participation experiment: Results from a Canadian comparative study Exploring the value of participatory system dynamics in two paired field studies of stakeholder engagement in sustainability discussions Financial rewards do not stimulate co-production: Evidence from two experiments How to increase citizen co-production: Replication and extension of existing research Influencing citizen co-production by sending encouragement and advice: A field experiment

Year

Author (Last Name)

Article

(continued)

Education

Education

General

Environment

Health

General

Policy area

DV

DV

IV

IV

IV

IV & DV

IV/DV

Field

Field

(continued)

Lab & survey

Field

Field

Field

Type of experiment

652 S. KANG AND G. G. VAN RYZIN

2010

2018

Cavalcanti, Schlapfer and Schmid

Li, Xia, Chen and Sun

General

Environment

Planning

General

Health

Policy area

Journal of Cleaner Production Environment

Ecological Economics

Journal of Environmental Management

2009

Cotterill, John, Liu and Nomura

Public Administration Review

European Planning Studies

2012

Hock, Anderson and Potoski

Health Risk and Society

Journal

Buchecker, Meier and Hunziker 2010

2008

Wiedemann and Schutz

Informing the public about information and participation strategies in the siting of mobile communication base stations- an experimental study Invitation phone calls increase attendance at civic meetings: Evidence from a field experiment Measuring the effects of consensus-building processes with methods of intervention research Mobilizing citizen effort to enhance environmental outcomes Public participation and willingness to cooperate in common-pool resource management: A field experiment with fishing communities in Brazil Public participation in achieving sustainable development goals in China: Evidence from the practice of air pollution control

Year

Author (Last Name)

Article

(continued)

IV

IV & DV

IV & DV

IV

DV

IV

IV/DV

(continued)

Quasi-experiment

Field

Field

Quasi-experiment

Field

Survey

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653

2017

2012

2014

2015

2018

2015

Langer, Decker and Menrad

Herian, Hamm, Tomkins and Pytlik Zillig

Terwel, Koudenberg and Ter Mors

Moseley and Stoker

Factor

Riccucci, Van Ryzin and Li

Public participation in wind energy projects located in Germany: Which form of participation is the key to acceptance Public participation, procedural fairness, and evaluations of local governance: The moderating role of uncertainty Public responses to community compensation: The importance of prior consultations with local residents Putting public policy defaults to the test: The case of organ donor registration Reducing traffic violations in minority localities: Designing a traffic enforcement program through a public participation process Representative bureaucracy and the willingness to co-produce: An experimental study

Year

Author (Last Name)

Article

(continued)

Public Administration Review

Accident Analysis and Prevention

International Public Management Journal

Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

Renewable Energy

Journal

Environment

Policing

General

Planning

General

Environment

Policy area

DV

IV

DV

IV

IV

IV

IV/DV

Survey

(continued)

Quasi-experiment

Survey

Survey

Survey

Survey

Type of experiment

654 S. KANG AND G. G. VAN RYZIN

2017

2019

2003

2019

2016

2016

Mazerolle, Bennett, Antrobus and Eggins

Porumbescu, Neshkova and Huntoon

Arvai

Hattke and Kalucza

Zhang, Zhang, Yu and Ren

Yang and Ott

The co-production of truancy control: Results from a randomised trial of a police–schools partnership program The effects of police performance on agency trustworthiness and citizen participation Using risk communication to disclose the outcome of a participatory decision-making process: Effects on the perceived acceptability of risk-policy decisions What influences the willingness of citizens to co-produce public services: Results from a vignette experiment What keeps Chinese from recycling: Accessibility of recycling facilities and the behavior What motivates the public: The power of social norms in driving public participation with organisations

Year

Author (Last Name)

Article

(continued)

Public Relations Review

Resources Conservation and Recycling

Journal of Behavioral Public Administration

Risk Analysis

Public Management Review

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency

Journal

General

Environment

Environment

Planning

Policing

Education

Policy area

DV

DV

DV

IV

DV

IV

IV/DV

Lab

Lab

Survey

Survey

Survey

Field

Type of experiment 33 EXPERIMENTAL METHODS FOR INVESTIGATING CO-PRODUCTION

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References Andersen, S. C., Jakobsen, M., Serritzlew, S., & Thomsen, M. K. (2017). Coproduction of public services. In Experiments in public management research: Challenges and contributions (pp. 329–344). Cambridge University Press. Bernstad, A., la Cour Jansen, J., & Aspegren, A. (2013). Door-stepping as a strategy for improved food waste recycling behaviour—Evaluation of a full-scale experiment. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 73, 94–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.res conrec.2012.12.012. Cavalcanti, C., Schläpfer, F., & Schmid, B. (2010). Public participation and willingness to cooperate in common-pool resource management: A field experiment with fishing communities in Brazil. Ecological Economics, 69(3), 613–622. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.ecolecon.2009.09.009. Cotterill, S., John, P., Liu, H., & Nomura, H. (2009). Mobilizing citizen effort to enhance environmental outcomes: A randomized controlled trial of a door-todoor recycling campaign. Journal of Environmental Management, 91(2), 403–410. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2009.09.010. Factor, R. (2018). A quasi-experiment testing a public participation process for designing and implementing an enforcement program among minorities. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 15(1), 77–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-0189327-5. Fledderus, J. (2015). Does user co-production of public service delivery increase satisfaction and trust? Evidence from a vignette experiment. International Journal of Public Administration, 38(9), 642–653. https://doi.org/10.1080/01900692. 2014.952825. Herian, M. N., Hamm, J. A., Tomkins, A. J., & Pytlik Zillig, L. M. (2012). Public participation, procedural fairness, and evaluations of local governance: The moderating role of uncertainty. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 22(4), 815–840. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mur064. Hjortskov, M., Andersen, S. C., & Jakobsen, M. (2018). Encouraging political voices of underrepresented citizens through coproduction: Evidence from a randomized field trial. American Journal of Political Science, 62(3), 597–609. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/ajps.12360. Hock, S., Anderson, S., & Potoski, M. (2013). Invitation phone calls increase attendance at civic meetings: Evidence from a field experiment. Public Administration Review, 73(2), 221–228. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2012.02627.x. Jakobsen, M., & Andersen, S. C. (2013). Coproduction and equity in public service delivery. Public Administration Review, 73(5), 704–713. https://doi.org/10.1111/ puar.12094. James, O., Jilke, S. R., & Van Ryzin, G. G. (Eds.). (2017). Experiments in public management research: Challenges and contributions. Cambridge University Press. Kang, S., & Van Ryzin, G. G. (2019). Coproduction and trust in government: Evidence from survey experiments. Public Management Review, 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1080/14719037.2019.1619812. Knutsson, M., Martinsson, P., & Wollbrant, C. (2013). Do people avoid opportunities to donate?: A natural field experiment on recycling and charitable giving. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 93, 71–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo. 2013.07.015.

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Li, L., Xia, X. H., Chen, B., & Sun, L. (2018). Public participation in achieving sustainable development goals in China: Evidence from the practice of air pollution control. Journal of Cleaner Production, 201, 499–506. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jclepro.2018.08.046. Mazerolle, L., Bennett, S., Antrobus, E., & Eggins, E. (2017). The coproduction of truancy control. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 54(6), 791–823. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427817705167. Nabatchi, T., Sancino, A., & Sicilia, M. (2017). Varieties of participation in public services: The who, when, and what of coproduction. Public Administration Review, 77 (5), 766–776. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12765. Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453–460. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.jcps.2011.08.002. Parks, R. B., Baker, P. C., Kiser, L., Oakerson, R., Ostrom, E., Ostrom, V., Percy, S. L., Vandivort, M. B., Whitaker, G. P., & Wilson, R. (1981). Consumers as coproducers of public services: Some economic and institutional considerations. Policy Studies Journal, 9(7), 1001–1011. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072. 1981.tb01208.x. Riccucci, N. M., Van Ryzin, G. G., & Li, H. (2016). Representative bureaucracy and the willingness to coproduce: An experimental study. Public Administration Review, 76(1), 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12401. Rosenbaum, P. R. (2017). Observation and experiment. Harvard University Press. Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasiexperimental designs for generalized causal inference. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Tarko, V. (2016). Elinor Ostrom: An intellectual biography. Rowman & Littlefield. Voorberg, W., Jilke, S., Tummers, L., & Bekkers, V. (2018). Financial rewards do not stimulate coproduction: Evidence from two experiments. Public Administration Review, 78(6), 864–873. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12896. Yang, F., & Ott, H. K. (2016). What motivates the public? The power of social norms in driving public participation with organizations. Public Relations Review, 42(5), 832–842. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2016.09.004.

CHAPTER 34

Co-production: Using Qualitative and Mixed Methods Vivian R. Ramsden, Tanya Verrall, Nicole Jacobson, and Jackie Crowe-Weisgerber

Background Co-production occurs when individuals/patients/end-users and communities are engaged in the development of a service or product which in this context is research, thereby helping to ensure quality and enhance value (Grönroos 2011; Turakhia and Combs 2017). Although the word co-production may have historical roots in civil rights and social care (Realpe and Wallace 2010) in the USA, this work has been undertaken in a variety of ways over time. For example, primary health care as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) is essential health care, based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology, that is universally accessible to all in the community through their full participation (co-production); available at an affordable cost, and geared towards self-reliance and self-determination (WHO 1978). This definition of primary health care shifted the emphasis of health care to the people themselves and their needs, reinforcing and strengthening their own capacity to shape their lives. In the UK, co-production in health care and social services has gone beyond models of service user consultation (i.e. tokenism) (Arnstein 1969; Realpe and Wallace 2010). Collaborative co-production requires V. R. Ramsden (B) · N. Jacobson · J. Crowe-Weisgerber Department of Academic Family Medicine, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada e-mail: [email protected] T. Verrall Saskatchewan Health Quality Council, Saskatoon, Canada © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_34

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individuals/patients/end-users and communities to be experts in their own circumstances and capable of making decisions, while professionals move from being fixers to facilitators; thus, co-production requires authentic engagement with individuals/patients/end-users and communities. This necessitates new relationships by researchers with individuals/patients/end-users and communities, as well as health care providers, thus emphasising the need for professional development/training so that all members of the research team can take on these new roles (Ramsden et al. 2019; Realpe and Wallace 2010). Thus, research that is co-produced must engage individuals/patients/endusers and communities in identifying and addressing locally relevant issues that impact health and well-being. In Canada, a framework for engaging individuals/patients/end-users and/or communities is outlined in Chapter 9 of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2018). This chapter was specifically developed for research projects involving First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples (Indigenous peoples) and their communities, as they are to have a role in shaping and co-producing/co-creating all research that affects them. These principles can and have been applied in other circumstances e.g. working with communities in South India (Winter et al. 2017). Ensuring that engagement is both welcome and authentic is particularly relevant for working with and in communities and for developing other global health initiatives. Canada’s relatively new Strategy for Patient Oriented Research (Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2014) implores health researchers to engage individuals/patients/end-users and communities as equal partners in all aspects of the research process. Primary health care professionals are well placed to engage with individuals/patients/end-users and communities as they have already adopted the philosophy of promoting patient/community self-reliance and self-determination as outlined by the WHO (1978, 2018). Thus, in reading this chapter, it is important to recognise that worldwide, depending on the country and the discipline, there is a complex range of terminology describing research partnerships including co-production, authentic engagement, community-partnered participatory research, participatory research, participatory health research, action research, community-based participatory research and co-design. However, two common components found in all is that the individuals/patients/end-users and communities are respected for their decision as to whether they will or will not participate in the research being proposed and if they do so they will be engaged in all aspects of the research process (Goodyear-Smith 2017; Jones and Wells 2007).

Methods The engagement of individuals/patients/end-users and communities has become increasingly important in all aspects of the research process. Research that is co-produced with individuals/patients/end-users and communities is

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designed to improve health and well-being and to minimise health disparities (Israel et al. 2005). This partnership approach to research equitably involves individuals/patients/end-users, communities and researchers in all aspects of the research process and in which all partners contribute expertise and share decision-making and ownership (Allen et al. 2017; Israel et al. 1998, 2003). In addition, research that is co-produced is utilised to study and address community-identified issues through a collaborative and empowering action-oriented process that builds on strengths and assets of individuals/patients/end-users and communities (Minkler et al. 2006; Wallerstein and Duran 2006). Research that is co-produced takes time, patience, energy and commitment regardless of the method used. Building with and on the aspirations of individuals/patients/end-users and communities enhances capacity and sustains the changes made whether they be in practice, education, research or policy. Capacity, in this case, is defined as strengthening people’s ability capacity to determine their own values and priorities and to organise themselves to act on these (Eade and Williams 1995). Thus, building capacity is the process of reflection, leadership, inspiration, adaptation and searching for greater coherence between purpose, governance and activities. This fosters the building of communication: processes of negotiation; building relationships; conflict resolution and improving the ability of each of the partners to celebrate their diversity while building on strengths. In co-production, the individuals/patients/end-users and communities are considered to be experts in their lived experience and about the community within which they live (Fetterman and Wandersman 2005). The various processes that need to be undertaken before beginning to answer a research question using qualitative or mixed methods are outlined in Fig. 34.1 (Ramsden and Integrated Primary Health Care Research Team 2003; Ramsden et al. 2019; Shen et al. 2016). These processes result in co-production where power and empowerment are shared horizontally. Thus, researchers utilising co-production engage with individuals/patients/endusers and communities which is reflected in the processes, methods, results/findings, interpretations and conclusions (Martin et al. 2008; Ramsden and Integrated Primary Health Care Research Team 2003). Learning and the co-production of research are done together and are iterative as new insights are gained and implemented (Eade and Williams 1995; Oakley and Kahssay 1999). A systematic review, using realist evaluation, documented the significant benefits of co-production of partnering with communities: shaping all aspects of the research to be undertaken; developing programmes and implementing research protocols; interpreting and disseminating research findings/results; building capacity; generating system changes and, developing new unanticipated projects and activities (Jagosh et al. 2012). In addition, the synergy which evolves from the partnership produces expected outcomes and frequently additional and unexpected outcomes that form the basis for

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Co-Production of Research

. .

Reflect on the findings/results and processes. Co-interpret results/findings and identify new questions.

.

.

.

. .

Recognize individuals’/patients’/ end-users’ expertise as team members.

Academia

Build on strengths of the team to determine roles & responsibilities together.

. .

Identify and engage individuals/patients/endusers as early as possible.

Co-produce a set of values.

. .

Co-identify insights, prioritize actions to be taken. Co-disseminate results/findings in ways that are meaningful to all members of the research team.

Co-produce research objectives, questions and data collection methods through consensus. Make research processes transparent. Co-review the submission to the Ethics Committee which could/should include a Data Sharing Agreement.

.

Co-create a conceptual framework.

Individuals/Patients/Endusers and/or Communities

Iterative Process Building Sustainable Relationships & Capacity Developing a Shared Understanding & Commitment

Fig. 34.1

Processes to determine mix of co-production research methods

the next research questions to be co-produced and undertaken (Jagosh et al. 2015; Trickett and Beehler 2017). Co-produced research engages individuals/patients/end-users and communities in all aspects of the research process. Individuals/patients/endusers and communities are engaged as experts of their own experience with knowledge and skills to contribute to the question(s) being asked (Ramsden and Integrated Primary Health Care Research Team 2003). Mixed methods research combines elements from both the qualitative and quantitative paradigms, methodological orientation or philosophy of the researcher, and the research methods (Creswell and Piano Clark 2011; Tashakkori and Teddie 2003; Teddie and Tashakkori 2009). In mixed methods, the researcher: • collects and analyzes persuasively and rigorously both qualitative and quantitative data evolving from the research question; • links the two forms of data concurrently by combining them either sequentially (one building upon the other) or by embedding one within the other; • gives priority to one or both forms of data depending upon the research question(s); • uses the procedures in a single study or in multiple phases of a programme of study; • frames the procedures within each of the philosophical worldviews and theoretical constructs and, • combines the procedures into a specific research design that directs the plan for conducting the study or studies.

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The challenges of using mixed methods are (Creswell and Piano Clark 2011; Tashakkori and Teddie 2003; Teddie and Tashakkori 2009): • ensuring that the researcher(s) has/have the ability and skills to undertake a research project that uses both quantitative and qualitative methods (essential issues of rigour); • considering time and resources required because of the increased demands associated with mixed methods (importance of the research team); • securing funds to engage in mixed methods research. Guiding values need to be initially negotiated and then co-produced over time with and by the members of the research team. The guiding values could include the following: respect for self and others; building trust in relationships; responsibility and accountability of the individuals/patients/endusers and communities; freedom of the individual; kindness and compassion; patience; humility; transparency and inclusiveness (Allen et al. 2017; Canadian Institutes of Health Research 2014; Ramsden et al. 2010, 2019).

Discussion The theoretical constructs of co-production are based on the principle that the knowledge and skills of individuals/patients/end-users and communities are strengths which contribute to enhancing health and well-being (Rolfe et al. 2018). Developing capacity through co-production can best be achieved by building on and strengthening existing knowledge and expertise. Coproduction must be real, not just doing what has always been done: ‘make decisions for’ and then indicate that the individuals/patients/end-users and communities were noncompliant because they did not do what they were told to do. Thus, analysis by individuals/patients/end-users and communities is an essential part of co-production, and the roles of health care practitioners and researchers should be to work with individuals/patients/end-users and communities in ways that are meaningful to them (patient-centred). This is research “with” individuals/patients/end-users and communities, not ‘on’ or ‘for’ or ‘about ’ others (Allen et al. 2017; Macaulay 2017; Martin et al. 2008; Ramsden and Integrated Primary Health Care Research Team 2003; Ramsden et al. 2010; Ramsden et al. 2019). The goal is to co-produce meaningful outcomes/programmes; thus, the research team must find ways of learning about the health needs of individuals/patients/end-users and communities, working with them to address their health and well-being.

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An Example of Co-production with Individuals/Patients/End-Users and Researchers Working ‘with’ individuals/patients, end-users and communities to develop equitable partnerships broadens the base of perceptions and expectations that powerfully influences assumptions. This subsequently alters the way we engage in and with research, as well as the approach we take in interpreting the results/findings (Macaulay 2017). Health literacy has been recognised as an important determinant of health and has been closely linked to other social determinants of health in Canada (Ramsden et al. 2017a). Individuals with low health literacy face significant barriers in self-managing chronic diseases and navigating the health care system. The involvement of individuals/patients/end-users and communities with low literacy in research is crucial for the co-production of meaningful programmes. The objective of this project was to co-produce innovative solutions with individuals/patients/end-users with low health literacy using participatory research integrated with authentic engagement. The approach utilised was transformative action research which is fully participatory. Thus, relationships with the individuals/patients/end-users were critical before engaging with them on or about research questions. Ten individuals/patients from an east-side neighbourhood who were interested in improving visits with their health care provider and known to JCW were invited to review and reflect upon the questions asked by health care providers (College of Family Physicians of Canada 2016). An Exemption was received from the University of Saskatchewan’s Behavioural Research Ethics Board. Six individuals/patients (three men; three women) completed all processes. The questions that evolved from engaging with individual/patients/end-users in exploring what would assist them with improving their visits with a health care provider were used to co-produce a wallet card. Subsequently, individuals/patients were invited to utilise the wallet card in preparing for their next visit. Following this, individuals/patients were debriefed about what worked: individuals/patients felt much better prepared for the visit with their health care provider; and, what could be improved were the questions which evolved a second time. Thus, the two-sided wallet card currently includes the following questions: 1. What brought you to the clinic today? 2. What signs/symptoms have you been having and for how long? 3. What can the doctor/nurse do to help you resolve the problem? 4. What prescribed medicines (over-the-counter drugs and traditional medicines) are you currently taking? Do you have any side effects from them? 5. Are you currently using tobacco, alcohol and/or non-prescribed drugs? 6. What can you do to celebrate what you are doing for your health and well-being?

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This revised wallet card is going to be used in the near future with the Health Centre at Sturgeon Lake First Nation, Canada to evaluate transferability. Co-producing programmes with individuals/patients/end-users who have low health literacy has the potential to enhance patient visits and improve physician/nurse communication while at the same time assisting individuals/patients/end-users with navigating the health care system. In examples such as the one above, it will be important to consider innovative and more optimal ways to analyse the data and to subsequently measure the success of co-produced research. In the words of a recent Nature editorial: “The best research is produced when researchers and communities work together; knowledge generated in partnership with the public and policymakers is more likely to be useful to society and should be encouraged” (Editorial 2018).

Engaging in Co-produced Research When considering if co-production with individuals/patients/end-users and communities in research is being described or undertaken, consider the following questions (Ramsden et al. 2017b; Ramsden et al. 2017c): 1. Are individuals/patients/end-users and communities equitably involved in all appropriate aspects of designing the proposal? 2. Is there co-production in all of the processes to be used during and throughout the research proposed? 3. Are individuals/patients/end-users and communities involved with the reviewing process? 4. Are individuals/patients named as Investigators (provide a description of past collaborations with the individuals/patients/end-users and communities) and/or members of the Leadership Team? 5. How are individuals/patients/end-users and communities involved in analysis and interpretation of results/findings, dissemination of results/findings through presentations and as co-authors? 6. In what ways can mutual learning be fostered?

Conclusions This chapter highlighted the various processes undertaken when utilising coproduction in collaboratively answering meaningful research questions with individuals/patients/end-users, and communities. Advocates of co-production encourage collaboration between researchers and those affected by the research, to ensure that the resulting science is relevant and useful (Durose et al. 2018). Durose et al. (2018) also indicated that co-production was better for civil society as it leads to better research, which in turn increases the chances of improving health and well-being of individuals/patients/end-users, communities and the health care system.

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Trickett, E.J., & Beehler, S. (2017). Participatory action research and impact: An ecological ripples perspective. Education Action Research, 25(3), 1–16. Turakhia, P., & Combs, B. (2017). Using principles of co-production to improve patient care and enhance value. American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, 19(11), 1125–1131. Wallerstein, N., & Duran, B. (2006). Using community-based participatory research to address health disparities. Health Promotion Practice, 7 (3), 312–323. Winter, J., Russell, E., Kanchana, S., Rajanarayaan, K.R., & Ramsden, V.R. (2017). Evaluation of the village health empowerment training program. International Centre for Collaborative Research-Journal of Nursing Research, 2(1), 99–103. World Health Organization. (1978). Primary health care: Report of the International Conference on Primary Health Care, Alma-Ata. Geneva, CE: World Health Organization & UNICEF. World Health Organization. (2018). Declaration of Astana: Primary health care. Geneva, CE: World Health Organization & UNICEF.

CHAPTER 35

Co-producing Research with Users and Communities Catherine Durose, Beth Perry, and Liz Richardson

Introduction Co-production is now acknowledged as a mobilising narrative for reform and change (Vershuere et al. 2012; Osborne et al. 2016) across sectors, including knowledge production. This chapter focuses on co-production in the context of research, and how research users and communities can be engaged in the production of knowledge. Reflecting these broader debates on co-production, co-production of research is prompted by two crucial premises. First, giving of acknowledgement and value to the contribution and stake that those who are not professional or academic researchers have in the research process. For community-based research, such individuals may include those who participate or provide data for research, those who use the research, or those communities affected by research. Implicit here is a critique of modes of knowledge production that fail to acknowledge or value such contributions. Second, recognising that many of the most pressing research problems and significant research

C. Durose (B) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] B. Perry University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK L. Richardson University of Manchester, Manchester, UK © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_35

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questions are unlikely to be addressed through academic or scientific expertise and alone and instead require the bringing together of different forms of expertise, including those beyond the academy. Advocates of co-production of research therefore encourage collaboration between professional researchers and those affected by or using that research. The aims of co-production are wide-ranging, from democratisation of the research process to a commitment to ensuring that the resulting research is relevant and useful. Co-production recognises, for example, that patients have a potentially valuable input to offer to research on their conditions (Smith et al. 2019), and first-hand experience of local residents could helpfully shape research on environmental and public health issues (Corburn 2005). Coproduction of research is both a recognition of existing diverse contributions to research and the ambition to transform the research process. Co-production of research has gained traction in recent years with growing recognition of the benefits of research that not only works across disciplines within the academy, but includes expertise from outside of it. This context is paralleled with the increasing scrutiny that universities face about their purpose and societal contribution, with growing expectations to ‘reach out’ (Harloe and Perry 2004; May and Perry 2006), partner externally and work with ‘extended peer communities’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). Yet, a number of questions about co-production in research remain open, as Oliver et al. (2019, 1) neatly skewer: Despite the multiplicity of reasons and incentives to co-produce, there is little consensus about what co-production is, why we do it, what effects we are trying to achieve, or the best co-production techniques to achieve policy, practice or… change.

Indeed, for Flinders et al. (2016, 263), co-production is an example of an ‘essentially contested concept’ with various interpretations, representing a range of activities, but without a single clear or agreed method. Despite its promise and potential, shifting away from a ‘traditional’ mode of knowledge production towards co-production is challenging. As Elinor Ostrom pithily observes co-production will not: ‘occur spontaneously simply because substantial benefits could be achieved’ (Ostrom 1996, 1082). Working coproductively in the context of knowledge production demands skills that are often not required or incentivised in academia (Flinders and Anderson 2019, 3) and raises questions concerning politics, ethics and identity that are often not subject to such scrutiny. In this chapter we aim to illuminate some of these debates and challenges by addressing three questions: • What is co-production of research, and why does it matter? • Is co-production a methodology or a method for research?

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• What are some of the politics and challenges involved in co-producing research? This chapter first considers the critical grounding and definition of coproduction in the context of knowledge production. We then situate co-production within other forms of collaborative research and the research process itself. We discuss co-production as a methodology, and consider from our own experiences some of the methods that can help or hinder coproduction. The challenges of co-production, including how co-production is valued within the academy are then considered. Throughout the chapter, we offer a range of examples that reflect both our own work and the reach and diversity of co-production with research users and communities. We conclude with the acknowledgement that to open up the research process beyond the academy relies not only on continued testing and learning about co-production but also on the development of appropriate ways to value and evaluate co-production and our own sustained reflexivity (May and Perry 2017; Durose et al. 2018).

What Is Co-production in Knowledge Production and Why Does It Matter? We may understand co-production in this context as being driven instrumentally by external imperatives, for example as related to the growing understanding of knowledge production as a crucial asset for future economic growth. Indeed, the financial sustainability of universities increasingly relies on the ability to harness and extract value from innovation and creativity, for example through external partnerships (May and Perry 2018). Such drivers have prompted shifting modes of knowledge production. Yet co-production of research may also be understood within a cross-disciplinary proliferation of research that aspires to encourage greater participation and empowerment of research users and communities in knowledge production. Shifting Modes of Knowledge Production Within universities, the primary ‘traditional’ mode of knowledge production has been pure, disciplinary, homogenous, expert-led, hierarchical, peerreviewed and university-centred (Gibbons et al. 1994). In contrast, coproduction operates in a mode which is applied, heterogeneous, problemcentred, transdisciplinary and change-oriented (Hart et al. 2013, 6). As such, we may characterise co-production as: • a response to the limits of traditional modes of knowledge production, that may be perceived as inward-facing, overly specialised and in part, ironically detached from the field of study;

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• a challenge to the established institutionalisation of expertise in favour of greater acknowledgement of a social distribution of expertise (May with Perry 2011); • a recognition of the valuable experiential and applied expertise that exists outside the academy; and • a means of producing knowledge that works across traditional disciplinary boundaries and epistemic communities (May and Perry 2017). Disciplinary Roots and Reach of Co-production Co-production of research has been interpreted and manifests in different ways in different disciplines. In urban studies, critical geography and development studies, coproduction is broadly informed by a critical grounding and commitment to democracy, empowerment, social justice and human rights (Heron 1971; Heron and Reason 1997; Lewin 1946; Narayan et al. 1999). Co-production is positioned as a response to a critique of a mode of knowledge production that has failed to include those communities that its addresses, targets or affects (Lister and Beresford 2000; Denis and Lomas 2003; Williamson and de Souza 2010). In science and technology studies, co-production is associated with a critical reflection on the construction of knowledge and reflects a deeper move towards an epistemological position that values ‘experiential expertise’ (Collins and Evans 2002). For example, scholars such as Sheila Jasanoff have suggested that research can gain explanatory power by thinking of natural social orders as being produced together: [the co-production of knowledge] is short-hand for the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live it… society cannot function without knowledge any more than knowledge can exist without social supports. (Jasanoff 2004, 2–3)

In disciplines such as political economy, co-production is used to acknowledge bringing together of different interests and voices, as a means of generating ‘creative synergies’ (Ostrom 1996, 1087), and providing a process for social innovation (Voorberg et al. 2015). By acknowledging that expertise is distributed across the ‘many not the few’ (Bennett and Roberts 2004, 7), and asserting that ‘contributions from specific disciplines and social actors are not privileged over what other disciplines and social actors contribute’ (Pohl et al. 2010, 217), co-production seeks to challenge the embedded knowledge hierarchies of the expert versus the layperson (Porter 2010). Co-production is seen as a means of opening up knowledge production to counter-hegemonic interests and often excluded

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or under-represented voices (Freire 1970; Brock and McGee 2002; Gaventa 2005) in a way that is both reflective or and aiming to deliver particular social values.

Co-production as Linking Voice, Actions and Values Seeing co-production as raising questions about voice (whose voice matters in research), actions whose actions matter in research) and values (what is the purpose of research) helps us to understand the distinctive positioning of coproduction within the wider paradigms of cross-disciplinary and participative research. As suggested, co-production in research is a distinctive mode of knowledge production and offers a particular contribution to our understanding of the relationships between forms of knowledge and epistemic cultures (Klein 1990). As summarised in Table 35.1, there are different forms of disciplinary knowledge, which are distinct from each other, but also distinct from coproduced knowledge. These different forms offer different responses to the question of whose voice and actions matter in research. The shift from disciplinary to multi or interdisciplinary knowledge production can be understood as part of an endogenous search for new research questions and approaches at the edge of disciplines. However, the idea of disciplines is left intact, insofar as disciplines have discrete and defined epistemologies, underpinned by accepted norms, methods and forms of analysis and representation. Critically, multi and interdisciplinarity echo traditional modes of knowledge production: first, in attributing a clear epistemological superiority to academic expertise and second, in mirroring traditional processes for undertaking research. Drivers for interdisciplinarity may stem from within the academy, as researchers seek to extend and transcend their own paradigms through making new connections. Yet there are also exogenous factors that create the need for new kinds of knowledge production across epistemic borders. One particular issue relates to the complexity, wickedness or messiness of objects/subjects of study and the need for problem-driven or oriented research (Nowotny et al. 2001; Polk 2013). As expertise to address interconnected issues lies across disciplines, sectors, institutions and communities, this gives rise to transdisciplinary (TD) knowledge production (Lang et al. 2012; Richardson et al. 2018). Transdisciplinarity moves beyond disciplines, requiring recognition of the value of other forms of expertise that lie outside the confines of epistemic communities within the university. Valid knowledge is constituted as existing both within the university and also in contexts of application and use (May and Perry 2018). Expertise from within and outside the university is synthesised to produce knowledge products or outputs that are fundamentally different from those that could be generated within the confines of traditional disciplines.

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Table 35.1 Characteristics of forms of knowledge

Disciplinary Multidisciplinary

Interdisciplinary

Transdisciplinary

Co-production

What knowledge?

Whose expertise?

How knowledge is produced?

Bounded disciplinary knowledge Bounded disciplinary knowledge

Academics

Porous disciplinary knowledge at the intersections of disciplines Applied knowledge forged through new configurations of expertise across disciplines, sectors and communities within and outside the university

Academics

Applied knowledge forged through new configurations of expertise across disciplines, sectors and communities within and outside the university

Multiple knowledge producers

Disciplinary methods, norms and processes Parallel working in larger teams within disciplinary silos Joint team working to create new knowledge objects across disciplinary boundaries A focus on methods which surface and blend different forms of expertise; the emphasis is on the equal value attributed to different forms of knowledge A focus on research designs which embed principles and values around the research process to value knowledge bearers as experts in their own right; the emphasis is on different ways of knowing and processes of undertaking research, as much as the value of different kinds of expertise

Academics

Multiple knowledge producers

Co-production embeds the epistemological assumptions that underpin transdisciplinary knowledge production. It is distinctive however in combining a concern for the value of different forms of expertise, with different ways of knowing, including knowledge production through joint action, and with a concern for the knower themselves, voice. In this respect, co-production is one approach to realising transdisciplinary knowledge production through the process of research itself. TD research could—hypothetically—be undertaken in an extractive mode, in which new knowledge objects are synthesised from multiple forms of expertise inside and beyond disciplines without any real concern for whose knowledge matters. Co-production in research is underpinned by a greater concern for the participatory nature of the research

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Table 35.2 Spectrum of participatory research

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What is shared? Co-operation Collaboration Co-production

Shared Shared Shared Shared Shared Shared

actions actions goals actions goals values

process, in which those with valid knowledge are legitimised as experts alongside academic disciplinary specialists. Looking from a different angle helps to further consolidate this view of coproduction linking voice, action and value. For some, co-production represents the apex of a diverse spectrum of participatory research that goes beyond cooperation or collaboration on the basis of values, as Table 35.2 sets out. Many therefore welcome co-production as part of a more open and democratic process of knowledge production (Brock and McGee 2002), that moves beyond dialogue between groups to an interdependent relationship with the possibility of transformation through shared action (Robinson and Tansey 2006; May and Perry 2018). To this extent co-production is a methodology that challenges epistemological hierarchies and manifests in different research designs based on common principles and values.

Is Co-production a Methodology or a Method for Research? Methodology is the underlying theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed. While co-production offers a distinctive take on methodology, it does not prescribe particular methods. Overall, there is no single method for undertaking co-production. Off-the-shelf approaches and case studies are helpful in generating insights and pointers to guide the design and delivery of work in the field, but need to be adapted to be suited to the specific context and content of the research at hand. In many cases, the best and most genuine co-productive relationships emerge organically, based on trust and experience. Design Principles for Co-production In our research (Durose and Richardson 2016; Perry et al. 2019), we have used design thinking to inform a series of principles that emphasis diversity of voice, the contours of action and the centrality of value to the research process. Some of these principles involve articulating key values for co-production, others reflect on how to work with and challenge power dynamics between different participants to ensure voice.

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Transparent: offering space for open and honest discussion, acknowledging difference Engaged: offering space for dialogue Respect for expertise: recognising that everyone has something to bring to the table Relational: underpinning relationships are essential Asset-based: starting from the strengths not the weaknesses Positive-sum: acknowledging that we are more than the sum of our parts Iterative: learning-from-doing Not decided in advance: open to change Self-aware: able to reflect and adapt

Fig. 35.1 Design principles—the TERRAPINS heuristic. Note Adapted from Durose and Richardson 2015

Our four-year research project, Jam and Justice, focused on co-production and what it means for how cities are governed, how policy decisions get made and, more importantly, what we can do collectively to tackle urban issues (Perry et al. 2019). Through the Jam and Justice project, we tested and refined our design thinking in a series of design principles into a simple heuristic, see Fig. 35.1. These principles are not intended to be prescriptive, but to offer a starting point for the practical work of designing co-production. While we do not advocate particular methods, in our own research we have found methods that are helpful in both engaging those that are least accustomed to the process and practices of research, and in disrupting entrenched power dynamics between participants. Three examples are listed below: Participatory Action Research (PAR) PAR is an approach to research in communities underpinned by commitments to pragmatism, empiricism and participation, emphasising collective inquiry grounded in experience and social history. Through a simultaneous and collaborative process of taking action, doing research and reflecting critically on both, PAR aims to understand the world by trying to change it. PAR aligned with our design principles for co-production, in acknowledging not only the messy and uncertain nature of the research process, but also the value of connecting research, reflection and action, and the significance of collaboration (Cook 1998; Mellor 2001). PAR also speaks to the need to combine rigour with relevance (May and Perry 2017).

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In the context of Jam and Justice, we expressed our commitment to action research through our commitment to ‘learning by doing’. Jam and Justice involved a group of 15 co-researchers from diverse walks of life with a common commitment to social change, called the Action Research Collective (ARC). A core responsibility of the ARC was to identify a series of urban issues—for example, how energy is produced for cities, how public money could be spent to produce more social value, and what roles local politicians could play in their communities. Each of these issues was investigated using a participatory action research process involving the ARC in delivery, research and analysis (Perry et al. 2019). The projects differed in topic and approach, but—reflecting a core principle of action research—allowed us to develop a comparative analysis of embedded cases testing various techniques for change (Lewin 1946). Deliberative Methods Deliberative approaches involve intensive engagement between small groups involving debate, planning and action over a period of time (Elstub and Escobar 2019). Within our recent Jam and Justice research project (Perry et al. 2019), we adapted a deliberative method: the citizen’s jury. One of the urban issues we looked at was how older people could be better supported to live a good life in their own. Where a typical citizen’s jury has citizens deliberating based on evidence from technical experts, in the Care at Home project, technical specialists deliberated instead on ‘expert’ testimony from people with lived experience. The jury deliberated on the questions of: ‘What would it take to help people live a good life at home for as long as they choose?’ A cross-sector reference group, brought together by an external partner, helped to set the enquiry question. Six inquiry sessions were facilitated, yielding recommendations that have been widely shared, for example with the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership. Data was collected in this research through tracking the development of the project, observations of the enquiry sessions and interviews with the participants (Perry et al. 2019). Visual or Creative Methods Photovoice is a community-based participatory research method aiming to give VOICE through PHOTOgraphy. Developed in the mid-1990s within public health by Caroline Wang and her colleagues (Wang 1999; Wang and Burris 1994, 1997; Wang et al. 1998), it is a method gaining growing attention. Influenced by feminist theory, popular education and documentary photography (Wang and Burris 1994), photovoice aims to document the strengths or challenges of a community; empower individuals by providing a collective platform; and begin a dialogue to effect change (Sanon et al. 2014). It is a method suited to and often used with under-represented groups, culturally diverse populations and with communities where literacy or verbal fluency

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may be an issue. For example, to enhance understanding of immigrant Chinese women’s health (Wang 1999), to give voice to mothers with learning difficulties (Booth and Booth 2003), and to reveal place-based understandings (McIntyre 2003). Photovoice often situates research subjects as collaborators (Allen 2012). Lorenz and Kolb (2009) argue that as participants create visual data to use as a basis of discussion, there is a transformation of the experiential knowledge of everyday life into data that would have remained hidden by more official surveys. In Jam and Justice, we used photovoice as part of a project, Everyday Politics, working with a cohort of people who were disengaged from formal politics and did not vote. Participants were invited to take photographs reflecting how they understood politics beyond the ballot and how they think and act politically within their own communities (Perry et al. 2019).

When to Co-produce? In a broad sense, ‘opening up science beyond scientists is essential, particularly where problems are complex, solutions are uncertain and values are salient’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). However, we should also consider the stage of the research process at which co-production can be most significant, relevant or useful. Were the initial questions defined co-productively? Or did co-production happen later, such as during analysis, interpretation and dissemination of the findings? For example, The British Medical Journal now requires that all its journal articles acknowledge whether and how patients or carers were involved in research—a demand that came about through consultation with those communities (Durose et al. 2018). Table 35.3 shows a series of typical stages in doing empirical research. Of course, this is a stylised representation of a relatively standard empirical research project, using a broadly deductive approach. However, even in a nonstandard empirical project or more inductive approach, many of these basic stages will still apply. There are many iterations not shown in Table 35.3, for example, the refinement of research questions or the area of interest will often happen over several stages, even during fieldwork. The degree to which governance of a project is formal or informal may also vary—for example, by the scale of project, or by the sector originating the research or hosting the coordination. Processes for conducting a non-empirical piece of research, such as a purely theoretical or conceptual piece, would also look quite different, and are not dealt with here. With these qualifications aside, Table 35.3 suggests some core basic tasks involved in empirical research; and offers an example from recent published research. Our point here is that each stage has potentially different implications for co-production. Not all stages are equally technically complex, but some require specialist technical knowledge of research methodology and methods. Table 35.3 also outlines some possible implications for co-production at each stage. Each of the challenges implies some thought about how they might be managed or mitigated.

Governance and oversight of research

Identifying research topic, issue and questions

1.

2.

Typical stage of research Perry et al. (2019)

• May depend on quality of governance, regardless of make-up of group • Selection of most appropriate participants is challenging

• Group dynamics are complex and may not result in effective decisions Corburn (2005) • Selection of most appropriate participants is challenging • Requires technical knowledge, e.g. of the existing literature and debates, what a ‘good’ research question looks like

• Strong levels of control over agenda

• Could define how issues are understood/framed • Includes range of expertise in specification

(continued)

Examples

Challenges/questions

• Transparent lines of accountability • Explicit systems for influencing and affecting change in research • Emphasis on how ethics are treated • Involves small numbers • Does not necessarily resolve • Could define how issues are inequalities in power, status and understood/framed knowledge • Requires ability to take strategic overview

• Strong levels of control over agenda, process and outputs

Benefits/rationale of co-production

Table 35.3 Benefits and challenges of co-production at different stages of research

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Designing research methodology

Sampling or selection of data sources

3.

4.

Typical stage of research

Table 35.3 (continued)

• Possible advantages in gaining access to certain populations

• Some control over focus of research and possibly results • May help to contextualise research and data, including gaps • May widen choices of sample/selection

Wynne (1992)

• May require some technical knowledge of research methodology

• Explicit focus on epistemology (ideas about how we go about understanding the world) • Few established processes for creating methodologies in more inclusive or participatory ways • Does not necessarily resolve inequalities in power, status and knowledge • May require some technical knowledge of research methods for sampling and source selection • Risks of biases, e.g. snowball samples • May demand universal rather than particular knowledge

Stoudt et al. (2016)

• Selection of most appropriate participants is challenging

• Strong levels of control over process

• Includes range of expertise and provides a grounded approach to design of data collection or analysis

Examples

Challenges/questions

Benefits/rationale of co-production

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Finalising and piloting research instruments

Data collection and/or collation

5.

6.

Typical stage of research

• Greater credibility with citizens from whom data is collected may allow different data to surface • Potentially accessible opportunity for participation and empowerment • Appropriate in particular circumstances where traditional methods may fail • Some proof that data quality is maintained

• Close contact with data may aid participation in other research stages

• May maximise the quality of data being collected

• Includes a range of expertise and provides a grounded approach to design of data collection

Benefits/rationale of co-production

• Many debates over risks of exploitation • Does not necessarily resolve inequalities in power, status and knowledge • May require technical skills in data collection and/or collation

(continued)

Richardson (2016)

Richardson (2013)

• Risks of biases, e.g. particular cultural understandings • Risk of ‘second guessing’ the reactions of capacity of potential research respondents, especially under-estimating capacity • Lower levels of control over research

Examples

Challenges/questions

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Data analysis and producing findings

Writing up results and publication

Dissemination, lobbying, policy impact/implications

7.

8.

9.

Typical stage of research

Table 35.3 (continued) Challenges/questions

• Risk of biases especially confirmatory findings, particularly where professional or citizen interests involved

• Could define how issues are understood/framed • Checks on accessibility to different audiences • Wider group of stakeholders may strengthen links between research, policy and practice

• Does not necessarily/in itself address all challenges of evidence-based or inspired policy and practice

• May require process for resolving difference in approach and conclusions

• Possible tensions between experiential knowledge and data • Strong levels of control over results • Group writing can be challenging

e.g. through triangulation and member sense checking

• Strong levels of control over results • May require technical skills in data analysis and interpretation • Potentially methodologically strong,

Benefits/rationale of co-production

Cordova and Gonzales (2016)

Perry and Atherton (2017)

Richardson (2014)

Examples

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Politics in Co-production of Research While we can identify a diverse lineage, clear incentives and emerging theory and practice for co-production of research, challenges remain. The development of ‘successful strategies’ (Ostrom 1996, 1082) for co-production of research is perceived by some to be hampered by a failure to acknowledge and be explicit about the so-called ‘hidden politics’ of co-production (Flinders et al. 2016, 261): the potential risks, costs and limits of this approach to knowledge production. Such politics are ‘rarely referred to in the literature’, which instead tends to focus on the positives of greater inclusion (Oliver et al. 2019, 1); and can present an ‘expectations gap’ (Flinders et al. 2016) for those involved in co-production, where its ideals sharply contrast with the messier realities of practice. We can understand these ‘hidden politics’ in three interrelated ways: • Co-production does not begin with a blank sheet, which limits what is possible. • Co-production is inevitably shaped by antecedent power. • Co-production inherently faces challenges in negotiating difference. First, new modes of knowledge production are not inscribed on a blank canvas but layered on pre-existing structures that mediate what is achievable (Lowndes and Roberts 2013). These inherited, inherent and inescapable structures can act as constraints on available or viable options; both ‘crowding out’ and actively working against efforts to introduce change (Brown and Head 2019). For example, institutional incentives of universities may place limits on achieving the aims of co-production, raising issues about both pragmatically about the ability of academics to work across boundaries with practitioners, policymakers and citizens. There is also an important question as to whether the academy gives value and validity to knowledge produced in this way (Richardson and Le Grand 2002; Durose et al. 2018). For many, co-production is a risky form of research for both academics and co-researchers (Flinders et al. 2016), with the potential to damage academic careers and threaten researcher independence and credibility (Oliver et al. 2019). A recent meta-study of sustainability-oriented projects using co-production, suggested ‘a trade-off between academic and societal impacts’ (Newig et al. 2019). However, the study also highlighted the value of structured methods of knowledge integration as a means of ensuring the quality of academic outputs and higher rates of citation (Newig et al. 2019). This finding resonated with our own observations as part of a special issue on the co-production of research for Nature on the value of developing context-appropriate standards and evaluation criteria for coproduction of research (Durose et al. 2018; Durham Community Research Team 2012; Wilsdon et al. 2015). Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre focusing on urban sustainability, has begun to develop such

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criteria, allowing co-production to be valued on its own terms, but in a way that also acknowledges the wider value of metrics for research (Durose et al. 2018). A second issue is that co-productive efforts are inevitably informed by differences in power within the research process. Co-production is not happening in a perfect world. Despite intentions to the contrary, it is instead shaped by antecedent forms of power that continue to ‘legitimize domination’ (Bolden 2011, 283). That is, those who have traditionally had power or status, or whose voices were seen as credible or legitimate in knowledge production, continue to be privileged over others even within a co-productive process. This might include, for example, academics retaining power within knowledge production, with other voices and forms of expertise being dismissed or undervalued (Redwood 2008; Orr and Bennett 2009). A further example could be particular groups being pathologised as only having particular kinds of expertise to contribute—for example, a belief that communities can only offer experiential expertise (Durose and Richardson 2016). As Pain et al. (2015, 121) highlight, ‘Participatory approaches cannot circumvent the paradoxes of power in research and representation … but through closer integration of theory and practice, they extend the processes of theorising and knowing beyond campus spaces’. In our research, we found a strong emphasis on the value of ‘honest’ practice, taking seriously differences and dynamics of power among stakeholders and giving space for discussion (Perry et al. 2019). Third, co-production inevitably involves the negotiation of difference. Coproduction necessarily brings together people who not only have different forms of expertise, but who likely have differences in their values and incentives, aims and priorities, standards for knowledge and preferences for working (Bovaird 2007; Flinders et al. 2016). We can add differences in resources, timescales and language to this mix (Martin 2010). Such differences are not easily resolved and there is no easy solution. In our own research, we have emphasised the importance of humanising the experiences, allowing time for differences to be meaningfully explored (Perry et al. 2019).

Ethics in Co-production of Research Co-production of research is, in part, a recognition of the challenge that community-based research poses to traditional approaches to institutionalised conceptions of ethics. Current ethical standards presume a distance between subject and object, researcher and researched, predictability of process and outcomes and control by professional researchers that does not reflect the ambitions or practice of co-production (Haggerty 2004; May and Perry 2020). The usefulness of an emphasis in institutional ethics processes on the acknowledgement and mitigation of harm to individuals, is questioned by Dyer and Demeritt (2009), and potentially precludes a focus on potential benefits. The Durham Community Research Team (2012, 9) note that

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these processes emphasise the researcher–subject hierarchy and may ‘protect institutional power at the expense of community empowerment’. Standard ethical procedures and conventions within universities are unsuited to dealing with the challenges of deep, collaborative research, including co-production (Beebeejaun et al. 2015). Within co-production, conversations concerning ethics are necessarily ongoing. Co-production is often claimed to be inherently more ‘ethical’ (meaning ethically good) than ‘traditional’ research in which there is alleged to be a clearer divide between researchers and researched. So, co-production is more ethically aware, for example, taking greater account of issues of power, rights and responsibilities and the roles of all stakeholders; and more egalitarian and democratic, based on respect for partnership with community members (Durham Community Research Team 2012). But, co-production also entails complex relationships of power and accountability and raises distinctive ethical challenges. For example, to what extent can anonymity be guaranteed in projects where partners’ identities are publicly known? What are the limits and boundaries of confidentiality, when researchers may have unprecedented and privileged access to the inner workings of partner organisations? What are the implications of university rules on data protection and intellectual property, in projects where knowledge collectively produced should properly be a common good? Addressing the ethical dilemmas of research, and co-production in particular requires us to remain reflexive about our own research practice and strategies for ethically concerned research (May and Perry 2018; Richardson et al. 2019). As Kesby (2007, 2813) argues, we need to expand our notion of ethical research beyond the ‘conventional wisdom of “do no harm”; by crafting new spaces for critical engagement… [where] participants and researchers can collaboratively generate knowledge and informed action’.

Emotional Labour and Identity in Co-production of Research The emotional labour of collaboration is widely acknowledged informally, but there is a long history of how the role of emotion in research becomes marginalised (May 2019). The absence of emotion from many published methodological statements comes in spite of the acknowledged value of being aware of your standpoint as a researcher (Harding 1991). Co-production requires an interaction with partners at a personal level and building relationships of trust. Yet doing so can mean a blurring of boundaries between personal commitments and institutional expectations; challenging the assumed role of academics as detached expert (Collins and Evans 2002) and can prompt a crisis of identity in belonging both within and outside the university (May and Perry 2020). Constant negotiation between diverse forms of knowledge; varying motivations, expectations and norms; differing resources and capacities; ensuring voice and inclusion without assuming consensus;

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and at the same time trying to ensure clarity and coherence is clearly both emotionally turbulent and demanding (May 2019). One of the ways to address the emotional labour in co-produced research is not only to acknowledge it, but to collectivise it—for example, through networks and spaces to talk about the challenges of co-produced research and to allow for collective reflection on positions, identities and political and ethical commitments in the process. Given the growing interest and demand for this kind of research, there are implications here for our institutions in supporting such spaces.

Conclusion Co-production is a concept that has mobility across domains; in this chapter we have reflected upon the growing interest and practice of co-production in knowledge production and research. Co-production in research reflects a wider commitment to valuing diversity of expertise and experience in framing and addressing shared concerns. Indeed, co-production represents a shift in modes of knowledge production towards research that is heterogeneous, problem-centred, applied, works across traditional boundaries and epistemic communities and with an explicit commitment to change. In doing so, coproduction in research builds on a diverse lineage of research practice that is reflexive and alert to the risks that research can exacerbate rather than challenge social injustices. While co-production aligns with contemporary institutional imperatives for research to be engaged and relevant beyond the academy, the value of co-production remains contested within the academy. Challenging this relies upon incentivising co-production. A key way to support co-production is developing the means to value it in a way that reflects but reconfigures how research is currently assessed: metrics (Durose et al. 2018). In this chapter, we have highlighted the distinctive connection that coproduction forges between voice, actions and values. It is in this connection that the distinctiveness of co-production from other cross-disciplinary, collaborative and participative endeavours may be understood. In thinking about how to design co-production of research, we have highlighted a series of design principles, that offer a basis for continued reflexivity, and methods that disrupt the traditional dynamics of the research process and that support wider participation. We have also sought to address further the question of when to co-produce, not only in terms of the external conditions, but also the internal stages of the research process. Co-production isn’t about devaluing science, but re-evaluating other ways of knowing (Durose et al. 2018). However, what works best will vary according to context and there is a need to continue to test and learn about different forms of co-production. While inspiring, co-production remains peripheral (Boyte 2005) in knowledge production: ‘a “crack” or a “wedge” in the dominant intellectual paradigm rather than a full-blown revolution’ (Flinders et al. 2016, 266). In this chapter, we have also sought to reflect on some of the ongoing challenges

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in realising ambitions for co-production in research, and to acknowledge the issues of politics, identity and ethics that co-production poses. In doing so, we hope to open up a space for our own and wider reflexivity about research and the transformative potential for co-production.

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CHAPTER 36

Developing Evidence-Based Co-production: A Research Agenda Tony Bovaird and Elke Loeffler

Introduction As earlier chapters in this Handbook have demonstrated, the field of coproduction has exhibited rich theoretical and conceptual development in recent decades. As many chapters have suggested, however, the empirical basis of co-production has been less thoroughly researched. In this chapter, we discuss how a more evidence-based approach might be taken to co-production. We begin by exploring the challenge to the academy in knowledge management around co-production, highlighting a range of developments which mean that public policy and practice urgently require a much richer knowledge base and that many current research strategies in public management and policy are under threat. In particular, a much fuller understanding of co-production must embrace its key characteristics, namely that it is holistic, contextual, multi-faceted, bridge-building, creative, dynamic, complex, emergent, behaviour-influencing and tacitly understood. We then discuss the potential for a long-term systematic research programme into those aspects of co-production which the studies in the Handbook reveal as still having only a weak evidence base. This section

T. Bovaird (B) INLOGOV, School of Government, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] E. Loeffler Strathclyde Business School, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_36

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summarises key research recommendations from each chapter of the Handbook. This leads to a discussion of how co-production might be evaluated, focusing on assessing not only its impacts on quality-of-life outcomes and public governance principles but also on the whole causal chain from inputs to those quality of life and governance outcomes. Finally, we explore how this research agenda might be furthered by a more creative approach, incorporating action research and the tapping of tacit knowledge.

The Challenges to the Academy: Issues for the Next Generation of Co-production Research No academic discipline remains stationary for long and this is even more the case with multi-disciplinary knowledge areas, such as public management or the policy sciences, drawing as each does on several disciplines which are themselves either in a state of flux or which are jostling with each other for priority within the prevailing fashions that are shaping scholarship in that branch of knowledge. Consequently, there are always challenges to the academy, most of which are ignored for long periods of time but eventually become recognised and even accepted—sometimes suddenly (giving rise to the appearance of ‘punctuated equilibria’), sometimes only very gradually (to the extent that many scholars hardly realise how much their subject area has changed during their working life, e.g. the creeping dominance of statistical studies in public administration from the 1980s onwards). However, the current wave of challenges to dominant modes of thinking in public management and policy are particularly dramatic and have important implications for co-production research. Here we highlight those challenges which seem to us to be most pertinent to making co-production research relevant for the turbulent era in which we live, work, study, govern and are governed. Among the current challenges are the need for our research and growing knowledge base to throw light on the following actual and potential characteristics of co-production: • Holistic—the holistic life of citizens means that they do not break down the outcomes they seek to achieve into neat bundles, but rather expect that their personal ‘outcomes mix’ is understood, respected and, as far as possible, delivered through the co-production activities in which they engage. Knowledge about co-production therefore needs to respond to its inherently multi-disciplinary character, in which a range of stakeholders must all focus on holistic quality of life, rather than simply seeking to maximise the outcomes in which they have a special interest (as is true

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of all approaches to outcome-based commissioning). This necessitates a much more holistic research approach to understanding and reporting the quality-of-life outcomes of service users and communities. Contextual —all citizens are different, so ‘one-size fits all’ approaches to co-production will be inappropriate (a longstanding lesson from the quality management of public services). This is even more the case when it comes to the strengths, assets and resources which citizens can offer in the co-production process—indeed, it seems likely that people differ even more in their ‘capabilities’ than they do in their ‘needs’. In future we therefore need ‘needs and capabilities assessments’, not just needs assessments, and appropriate tools are needed to allow such assessments to be undertaken accurately and expeditiously. Multi-faceted—citizens tend to identify with and prefer to interact with people with whom they have symbolic affinities, as well as actual common interests (this is one aspect of ‘identity politics’). This means that coproduction may be limited by artificial barriers to joint action and to overcome this, we need to understand the affinities felt by citizens. This adds to the demands on our research, which more commonly classifies citizens by their socio-economic characteristics and interests. Bridge-building —‘identity politics’ also means that co-production can be co-opted by governments, parties and interest groups who wish to use it for nefarious ends. For example, there have been concerns that digital co-production such as contact tracing apps developed to reduce the risk of infection in the context of Covid-19 may be misused by authoritarian governments. Consequently, our understanding of co-production must not only reveal how it appeals to the different affinities felt by our target groups, but it must also show the potential ways in which it can be bridge-building and inclusive, able to overcome the fragmented ideologies or ‘elective roots’ (linked to identity politics) which now characterise our hyper-politicised world (Freeden 2019–2020). Creative—as co-production activities develop and experiences are reflected upon, the limitations of old, bureaucratic ways of pursuing publicly-desired outcomes become more evident. For example, professionals working in health and social care have become increasingly aware of the importance of the ‘social model’ whereas their training often focussed on the ‘medical model’ in many aspects of health and social care. These emerging lessons require creative responses to break out of the moulds of outdated practices. Moreover, as Cormac Russell points out in Chapter 9, in the final analysis, in a democracy, citizens are the primary inventors, with professionals only there to support that invention, never to replace, demean or overwhelm it. However, we have to recognise that this creativity is not always for positive goals—participatory mechanisms (seeking to divine the ‘will of the people’), such as referenda or citizen assemblies, can be creatively hijacked to impose a straitjacket on decisionmaking, negating the possibility of learning from mistakes, uncovering of

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disinformation campaigns (‘fake news’), or adapting to changing circumstances (Freeden 2019–2020). Our understanding of co-production has to embrace both positive and negative aspects of creativity—in particular, can co-production help people more easily to distinguish relevant information from disinformation with regard to innovative experiences, so that their views, decisions and actions can correspond more closely to Rousseau’s concept of the ‘adequately informed general will’)? Dynamic—since co-production is inherently about interactions, and these develop over time, often involving more people as they develop, coproduction is necessarily a dynamic process, ever changing in its processes as well as its outcomes. It is therefore poorly understood by linear inquiry methods which use static data. Complex—co-production involves multiple actors with multiple interconnections, seeking multiple individual and collective goals, and learning emerging lessons from each other—this makes it likely that co-production takes place within a complex adaptive system, with the corollary that the effects of an action within any given time span are non-predictable. In the complex knowledge domain, all we can know is the set of potential outcomes which are attainable and how our interventions can alter this set—but not which of these outcomes is likely to eventuate from any specific intervention. Emergent —co-production often is not pre-planned but emerges as a natural way for stakeholders to interact with each other in the complex system in which they find themselves. Consequently, research into co-production should not be based purely on pre-planned research programmes—as Ewert and Evers suggest in Chapter 7, piloting coproduction programmes can pave the way for a democratic experimentalism. Instead of merely testing what is planned in traditional fashion, there should be more research using participative and collaborative interaction, flexible in approach and adaptive to changing circumstances. Behaviour-influencing —decisions are not purely rational, as Tinna Nielsen’s chapter in this volume makes abundantly clear. Neither the decisions of co-producers, nor the decisions of policymakers considering the adoption of a co-production approach, are made on purely rational grounds. Consequently, their preferences are quite malleable, so positive experiences can change their minds and their behaviour quite readily, under the right circumstances (Banerjee and Duflo 2019), including experiences of co-production activities. Tacitly understood—much knowledge which is relevant for excellent practice (and, ironically, this includes the practice of excellent research in the generation of explicit knowledge!) is tacit rather than explicit—‘we know more than we can tell’. Tacit knowledge is, by definition, hard to disseminate. Co-production, relying on citizen action and not just citizen voice, offers a key way of disseminating citizens’ knowledge, by having them co-deliver alongside members of public service organisations and other

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stakeholders. Similarly, training of citizens and staff as more effective coproducers may be best done through ‘sitting with Nellie’, on the grounds that ‘actions speak louder than words’.

Potential for a Long-Term Research Programme into Co-production In this section, we will discuss some of the key proposals made by authors in the Handbook for further research. Many of these respond directly to the challenges outlined in the previous section. Others respond to longstanding issues in the research on collaboration in public governance. Yet others respond specifically to issues in public consultation, participation and citizen engagement. We group these proposals essentially under the main headings of the Handbook: • • • • • • • •

Definitions, theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Co-commissioning. Co-design. Co-delivery. Co-assessment. Management of co-production. Governance of co-production. Co-production research methodology. Definitions, Theoretical and Conceptual Frameworks

The definition of co-production has been a topic on which a lot has been written over the past forty years. However, as Chapter 2 makes clear, we believe that we might usefully call a halt to the search for the ‘perfect definition’. Rather than delving ever more deeply into nuances of co-production, we suggest that research studies will be more productive if they accept one clearly set out definition, chosen from the range of current definitions of coproduction, then explore different ways of achieving co-production according to that definition and throw light on their actual and potential results in terms of quality-of-life outcomes, public governance principles and improvements to system resilience. This will enable research to suggest how to make coproduction, thus defined, more cost-effective. This will not necessarily throw up optimal answers—but in a complex adaptive system the search for an ‘optimal solution’ is, in any case, a chimera. We mentioned earlier that the preferences of service users and communities need to be understood as malleable. Peter Jackson (Chapter 4), looking at individual co-production, contrasts the economist’s standard assumption of exogenously determined, stable, and homogeneous tastes and preferences

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with more modern theories assuming that they are endogenous, fluid, flexible and heterogeneous and emergent, having been shaped by the consumer’s complex set of social interactions. This helps to explain why the propensities of citizens (and staff) to co-produce can differ sharply from context to context and serves to emphasise that co-production often takes place in the complex knowledge domain. However, little is known about how this variation in citizen preferences occurs and how it can be influenced—another reminder that public service marketing is still in its infancy, compared to private sector marketing. Klijn and Stevens in Chapter 8 of this Handbook argue that branding of public services and public spaces can build on insights about the role of emotions, rather than pure rationality, in making decisions and choices and go on to discuss how co-production can contribute to public service branding, suggesting some research avenues into how public service branding, using visual images and quick messages, can change behaviour. Nielsen in Chapter 5 takes a different tack, exploring how ‘inclusion nudges’ can change behaviour by working around and behind existing values, beliefs and prejudices but suggests that nudging does not create the sense of empowerment that is at the core of most successful and sustainable community and societal changes, so that more work is needed on creating the enthusiasm and feeling of empowerment that comes from the interactive and relational kind of co-production. Bertelli and Cannas tackle the long running issue in the literature as to whether co-production must always be voluntary or might, in some circumstances be mandatory. They raise two important research questions in relation to the law and co-production—first, what other legally recognisable concepts, apart from proximity, might legitimate co-production as a matter of law? Secondly, how can the law both legitimate co-production as a policy tool and at the same time permit its flexible application by policymakers, given how valuable is the discretion which co-production leaves in the hands of public managers and citizens in working together to achieve an objective? Arguing that the legal formalisation of co-production can ultimately be a doubleedged sword, e.g. if it means that co-producers could be held legally liable for the externalities which they create through their co-production, Bertelli and Cannas suggest the need for research into how to balance protection from ‘truly problematic action’ by co-producers against disincentives for citizen participation. Further, they suggest that, since administrative law is specific to the country in which it has emerged, future research will be needed into the range of legislative tools for implementing the co-production paradigm, and how these might vary across countries, including the trade-offs that might be necessary between the legal status and practicality of these co-production mechanisms. A number of authors in this section of the Handbook, including Strokosch and Osborne, and Klijn and Stevens, call for further research into the potential for co-production to result in value destruction, rather than creation. Klijn and Stevens are partly concerned about the costs to citizens of their contributions

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to co-production, a topic which has clearly been very under-researched to date and for which there is currently no convincing conceptual framework. (The recent article by Garlatti et al. [2018] highlights some of the directions which such research might take in public services, while a similar discussion on the costs of co-produced research is provided by Oliver et al. [2019]). As we highlighted in Chapter 2, understanding the change management necessary to operationalise greater and more cost-effective co-production remains relatively underdeveloped and further research on this would seem an urgent priority. Torfing, Toft Kristjansen and Sørensen in Chapter 18 consider this issue both from a macro and micro-perspective, suggesting the need for research on how ideas, resources and authority can be brought together through democratic processes of collaborative interaction in order to solve pressing societal problems. They identify the need theoretically to consolidate the distinction between co-production and co-creation through the development of conceptual taxonomies and discussions of the grey area where co-production shades into co-creation, together with more theoretical work on platforms and arenas to better understand the new forms of generative governance. At the micro level, they suggest the need for research both about the role of co-creation in politics and how neighbourhood organisations can enhance local participation and solve local problems through new forms of community-level co-design. A key issue in change management is how to scale up co-production and here Robert, Donetto and Williams in Chapter 16 suggest that the example of how EBCD has come to be widely viewed as an improvement methodology offers lessons on how to ‘scale up’ co-production, although with accompanying warnings to avoid co-optation and loss of fidelity. Co-commissioning Co-commissioning is the area of co-production which is closest to political decision-making, as it concerns societal priorities. As highlighted in Chapter 1, the role of politicians in co-production has so far been little researched, although there is often a supposition that many politicians may somewhat resent sharing power in decision-making with citizens, even though it is those very citizens who elected them in the first place. The account of participatory budgeting (PB) by Escobar in Chapter 15 demonstrates that there have so far been few case studies where politicians have whole-heartedly welcomed citizens as co-determiners of large elements of the government budget. Nor has political backing for PB always grown with experience, as Escobar’s account of the Brazilian experience highlights. It will be important to explore in more depth why this is and what strategies might be pursued to develop more political backing. Escobar also calls for more research into the most effective and sustainable approaches to PB, its impact on institutions and services, and outcomes achieved for citizens and communities, all of which he sees as crucial to inform democratic innovation and reform driven by public authorities and civil society.

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Ongaro, Mititelu and Sancini in Chapter 14 consider how co-production can be built into the commissioning cycle to make it a co-commissioning process. They suggest that this requires a learning attitude, although this is rarely enabled or facilitated by the environment of public sector organisations. They therefore recommend exploring the conditions under which learning can occur, combined with an open and flexible approach to strategic planning, utilising an open place-based platform for multi-stakeholder learning in which political astuteness works with concomitant, but also competing values, so that co-commissioning can be seen as integral to strategically managed approaches to co-production. Discussing micro-level commissioning, Musekiwa and Needham focus on the extent to which health professionals are willing to share control over health interventions—their empirical work highlights how slowly health professionals develop trust in the decisions made by their service users, although they detect some signs that there can be positive learning over time. This key issue clearly needs investigation in more detail and at larger scale. Co-design Co-design is clearly a highly popular form of co-production. Robert, Donetto and Williams have long been involved in extensive co-design initiatives but in Chapter 16 they express concerns that the distinction between co-design and other forms of co-production may have become too ‘fuzzy’. They therefore propose robust forms of quantitative and experimental evaluation of contemporary co-design in the health context, advising that ‘an eye should always be kept on potential tensions around different evaluation paradigms, as well as overlapping interests in studying mechanisms of action’, while recognising in equal measure the unique—and importantly radical—features and potential of both co-design and co-production. Remesar in Chapter 17, exploring the role of co-design in the transformation of public space, proposes that co-design procedure should be considered a social innovation process and suggests as objectives in an action-research process the delivery of proper information, setting up a creative procedure, designing a strategy inclusive of both processes and the different proposals of all relevant residents, and ensuring that the process and its outcomes are seen as belonging to neighbours and not to the facilitating team. Torfing, Toft Kristjansen and Sørensen in Chapter 18 press for more research both on the role of co-creation in politics and the ability of neighbourhood organisations to enhance local participation and to solve local problems through new forms of community-level co-design. They suggest that empirically we need comparative studies of actual processes of policy-related co-creation and co-design as they unfold in time and space in order to identify the barriers and drivers and reflect on how barriers can be overcome and drivers expanded.

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Moore and Evans in Chapter 19 suggest that quality co-design requires more understanding of the difficulties of working with citizens to change the ways in which decisions are made and implemented. However, they highlight the obstacles involved, given that co-design has emerged from many, often non-communicating, disciplines and there is still little shared understanding, particularly in government. As co-design challenges the established ways in which policy is made and services are designed, delivered, monitored and evaluated, they see the fundamental stumbling block to implementing co-design in practice as the lack of support by politicians and senior bureaucrats, partly because the ‘policy elite’ are largely econocrats or legally trained and not sufficiently open to exploratory and experimental approaches. Consequently, research needs to explore how to convince politicians and their political advisors of the merits of co-design processes. Co-delivery Elke Loeffler in Chapter 20 highlights the need not only for more research on how to achieve the potential benefits of co-delivery but also on its potential governance pitfalls (see also Chapter 31 by Steve Smith), particularly in public safety, where the increasing availability of surveillance technology may be infringing the public’s rights to privacy to a degree which goes beyond the appropriate balancing of public safety outcomes and public governance principles. She ends with a call for further research into the change management process needed to turn the huge potential of citizens’ co-delivery into quality of life improvements for citizens, overcoming the barriers posed by the fact that public service systems are still not designed, organised, incentivised or experienced in making use of the rich potential of citizen contributions. In Chapter 21, Trish McCulloch argues that development and innovation in the field of desistance requires a clearer understanding of the interdependence of individual, group and collective co-production in efforts to support desistance, and a willingness to invest in and experiment with more inclusive, empowering and disruptive forms. She notes that a key lever for change has been the rise of peer support and peer activism as a transformational mechanism for individual, social and system change, epitomised in the Independent Living Movement, with its user-led, collective, rightsbased, paradigm-changing, empowered, empowering and advocacy-oriented construction of peer support. Consequently, she suggests, the key challenge for would-be professional co-producers is to work out how to enable and support this necessarily peer-led movement without trying to monopolise it or undermining it as a genuinely co-productive endeavour and a mechanism for system and social transformation—an important area for future research.

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Co-assessment Benjamin Clark in Chapter 22 urges that, although the promise of coassessment through technological means has tremendous power to shape society and provide for better services for more people, governments need to recognise the lesson from research that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach but rather that different levels of engagement come with different applications. Moreover, both policymakers and researchers will need to have an open mind (to the potential of digital co-assessment, as future technological advances will likely enable new and different kinds of co-production that we cannot even imagine today. Dave Mckenna in Chapter 23 argues for the use in future research of the ‘wheel of co-assessment’—co-focussing, co-directing, co-detecting, cojudging and co-effecting—as an analytical framework for determining the extent and likely effectiveness of co-assessment in any audit, inspection or scrutiny process, distinguishing between processes that are fully co-productive and those only partially co-productive—but he highlights the need to explore co-judging, in particular, as the pivotal element of co-assessment. He also suggests use of three scenarios by Linders (2012) as a framework for thinking about how co-assessment might develop in the context of digital and social technologies—namely, citizen reporting, open book government and selfmonitoring. Management of Co-production A number of themes for future research have been suggested in relation to the management of co-production. In Chapter 24, Schlappa, Imani and Nishino suggest, based on the application of their conceptual framework to a case study, that leading in co-production processes requires a ‘light structure’ in which citizen and professional co-producers can deliberate on their goals and motivations not only individually but also in groups and with wider stakeholders. They also recommend the use of other relational leadership perspectives, and in particular exploration of the role of emotions (a theme also highlighted by Durose and colleagues in Chapter 35) in leadership–followership relations, to generate additional analytical frames to the social constructionist stance which they take. In Chapter 25, Tuurnas suggests some avenues for future research with regard to staff motivations to co-produce. First, what types of co-production take staff furthest out of their comfort zones and why? Her analysis here is later backed up by Brandsen’s call for more understanding of the conditions under which professionals are likely to engage in co-production. Second, there is a need to develop the categorisation of the core co-production skills for public service personnel, such as reaching out beyond the ‘loudest voices’ among citizens, and to explore how these co-production skills are handled in the formal

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education of staff in various public services. Third, there is a need to understand the transformation which co-production can bring about for staff in their work, especially where they are refocusing their identity. In Chapter 26, Trui Steen urges research into the interplay between factors which explain citizens’ engagement in co-production, namely motivation, ability, context and opportunity, in order to understand and manage the conditions for co-production as a ‘package’ rather than as entirely separate variables—in particular, do extrinsic motivators crowd out intrinsic motivation, how do co-producers’ perceptions of their capacity relate to their motivation and how do citizens’ willingness and capacity to participate in co-production projects depend on their environment and the efforts made by government to engage citizens? Adding to this, in their chapter, Schlappa, Imani and Nishino recommend specific research into how the motivation for volunteers and service users differs across the Four Co’s of co-production. In Chapter 27, Taco Brandsen concludes that co-production is a solution that will work well for certain people but that we still don’t know what its effect is likely to be on vulnerable and marginalised people, so we need more experiments and pilots to explore this. This responds to the suggestion by Jackson in Chapter 4 that those service users who are vulnerable and dependent may not be able to engage directly in acts of co-creation, so individual co-production relationships are more relevant where clients are free to make a series of reasoned choices on their engagement with a service. We need to be keenly aware that co-production has distributional consequences—and could even be seen as giving ‘government a licence to dump on users while claiming improvements in effectiveness’. Echoing the call by Loeffler and Bovaird in Chapter 2 for more research into the inter-relationship of co-production and resilience, Coaffee et al. in Chapter 28 argue that working with and co-producing knowledge alongside policy makers in the area of resilience involves fundamental questioning of the different cultures of universities, local citizenship and policy communities, rather than ‘simply rolling out classical models of superficial community and external stakeholder consultation where local citizens or businesses become co-opted or ‘responsibilised’ to fulfil state-type roles’. Consequently, coproduction is a necessary ingredient in research looking to transform conventional and institutionalised power relations in decision-making to understand better how we can respond flexibly to all manner of risks and crisis, and build resilience into our responses. Governance of Co-production As Gazley observes in Chapter 12, there is plentiful evidence of the need for greater safeguards on co-productive activity—e.g. governments may coopt citizen efforts, and both co-producing citizens and co-producing institutions may lose sight of or fail to deliver on public values.

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Victor A. Pestoff in Chapter 29 argues that exploring the impact of governance on the condition and well-being of either staff alone or users/citizens alone is insufficient—to understand the importance of governance models for promoting participative public governance it is necessary to study their impact on both the main actors in co-production, the staff and users/citizens. This reinforces the recommendation by Phinney and Sandfort in Chapter 11 for research on how exactly public organisations can move from governance characterised by an emphasis on market mechanisms and citizens as customers, backed up by the conventional authority of hierarchies and performance management, to a governance approach prioritising collaboration and co-production. Wouter Nieuwenhuizen and Albert Meijer in Chapter 30 ask: ‘Do we make a service more efficient by giving citizens more responsibilities, therefore partly neglecting lawfulness and integrity?’ They conclude that the necessity for democratic involvement in and societal debate on ICT-based co-production is higher when digital technologies are transformative or substitutive, because risks to values such as lawfulness, equality and participation are higher in those cases. They finish with a call for action: ‘A strong emphasis on public values is needed if we want to develop forms of co-production that are not only effective and efficient but also proper and responsive’ and they warn that the risks of digital co-production for public values are substantial, so it is important that society find solutions to incorporate more inclusive democracy in practices of ICT-based co-production. Steve Smith in Chapter 31 highlights how sustaining co-production programmes hinges on creating resilient systems and relationships that can weather crises—he suggests that this is likely to mean sustainable organisational funding, ongoing staff capacity building and training (e.g. in oversight and monitoring of co-production programmes, together with learning new engagement and outreach strategies), and support and appropriate incentives for engagement of community members. Further research needs to explore how to make such interventions effective. Scolobig and Gallagher in Chapter 32 observe that little research has focused on the social and power dynamics emerging during knowledge coproduction processes and highlight that inclusion of some stakeholders may slow down decision-making, or privilege the solutions of already powerful actors, rather than fostering fairness in decision-making. They therefore urge more research on how and why stakeholders form coalitions in co-production, with special emphasis on the role of trust between stakeholders, in order to understand better if the formation of coalitions contributes to conflicts being addressed (given that coalitions may also have negative effects, such as reducing the range of alternatives, as well as helping to shape compromises).

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Co-production Research Methodology The final section of this Handbook has been on the research agenda for co-production, focusing mainly on the methodologies which might be used to give us a deeper understanding of the practice and the potential of co-production. In Chapter 33, Kang and Van Ryzin urge the further use of experimental methods in co-production research, and note some gaps in the existing literature as well as issues for future research. They suggest that experimental research on co-production should widen out from its current main focus on environmental issues to the important areas of education, health and policing and indeed further to social care, transportation, housing, arts and culture. In particular, they identify the need for more studies measuring actual coproduction behaviours rather than intentions. This could usefully involve more lab experiments and more quasi- and natural experiments that involve exogenous change in real-world policies or administrative practices, e.g. changes in laws or rules, ideally with a comparative element. They also suggest more attention to stimulation of co-production via group- and meso-level institutional designs and structures, rather than individually targeted micro-level cues, information and incentives. They highlight the potential use of game theory experiments or natural experiments that can possibly probe the more institutional-level factors influencing the co-production of public goods and services. They speculate that experimental methods could also examine potential downsides associated with co-producing public services, probing for social, cultural or political moderating factors that shape how people perceive or behave in response to the co-production of public services in specific policy areas and governance contexts. In Chapter 34, Vivian Ramsden, Tanya Verrall, Nicole Jacobson and Jackie Crowe-Weisgerber suggest the need to consider innovative and optimal ways to analyse the data and subsequently to measure the success of co-produced research. Moreover, they emphasise the value of mixed methods in future research, reinforcing the recommendation of Torfing, Toft Kristjansen and Sorensen in Chapter 18 that methodologically we must challenge ourselves to combine qualitative case studies with the quantitative measuring of key variables in comparative case analysis, which could contribute to the discovery of competing combinations of factors that facilitate co-creation in different sectors and at different levels. In Chapter 35 on co-production research with service users and communities, Catherine Durose, Beth Perry and Liz Richardson emphasise the importance of humanising the experiences of very diverse co-researchers, allowing time for differences to be meaningfully explored. Moreover, they highlight that, although co-production can be more ethically aware (e.g. taking greater account of issues of power, rights and responsibilities and roles of all stakeholders) and more egalitarian and democratic (based on respect for partnership with community members), it also entails complex relationships of

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power and accountability and raises distinctive ethical challenges, so it requires researchers to remain reflexive about their own research practice and strategies for ethically concerned research. They recommend that the emotional labour in co-produced research should not only be acknowledged but also collectivised (e.g. providing space for discussion of the challenges of co-produced research and collective reflection on positions, identities and political and ethical commitments in the process). Since the value of co-production remains contested within the academy, there needs to be an incentive to challenge these barriers, e.g. by reconfiguring the metrics by which research is currently assessed. They provide a series of design principles that can offer a basis for continued reflexivity and underpin wider participation in future research. They end by emphasising that co-production isn’t about devaluing science but reevaluating other ways of knowing, that what works best will vary according to context and that there is a need to continue to test and learn about different forms of co-production.

Evaluating Co-production It is clear from the chapters in this Handbook that most co-production initiatives still have an inadequate evidence base, hence the suggestions for further research which we have summarised in this chapter. It will clearly be important to boost this evidence base, ideally in a way which is coordinated, at least to the extent that researchers link the implications of their own research clearly to those of different research projects in the field, making clear how their results reinforce or cast doubt on previous findings or throw up new findings. In order to achieve this, it would be valuable if researchers also made clear the evaluative framework within which they work and how their results fit within this evaluative framework. In our own research on co-production, we have sought to highlight the hypothesised causal chain linking inputs to outcomes, i.e. the overall theory of change, including the following elements (Loeffler and Bovaird 2018): • Increased quality-of-life outcomes arising from co-production. • Improvements to achievement of public governance principles arising from co-production. • Increased service quality from user/community involvement. • Increased service efficiency resulting from reduced organisational inputs or increased organisational outputs. • Reduction in service user inputs. • Increases in social capital arising from co-production. These elements potentially form a virtuous circle, rather than a linear causal chain, since improved quality-of-life outcomes may have valuable positive effects on citizen capabilities and therefore on future citizen inputs to coproduction (and similarly they may form a vicious circle if the outcomes are unfavourable).

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Although the final outcomes—both quality-of-life outcomes and achievement of public governance principles—might be expected to be the most important in the long term, each of these elements is important in its own right for some key stakeholders. The priority of these elements for researchers will therefore depend on their context and the research questions which they are investigating—but it will always be important to locate research results within this overall framework. Moreover, research is needed into how the priorities between these elements of the circular causal chain are established in the political process and how this might best be influenced by citizens themselves. Clearly, evaluation of co-production initiatives should not just explore ‘input/outcome’ ratios, since these are affected by so many contextual factors—it is essential that attention is paid to testing the hypothesised pathways to outcomes, in order to learn why co-production works better in some circumstances than others, to throw light on the risks involved and how they can best be managed by the many stakeholders involved, and how resilience (of users, communities, service providers and the overall service system) can be achieved. A key issue which has so far been very under-researched is the costs of co-production (Loeffler and Bovaird 2018), taking into account the costs to public service organisations, including: • • • • •

Inputs of front-line staff. Managerial inputs. Inputs of local councillors or other politicians. Investments in ICT-enabled forms of co-production. Investment in public infrastructure.

However, these costs represent only one side of the picture—evaluations also need to explore the costs imposed on service users and communities by coproduction, such as: • Increased time inputs to learn about co-production opportunities. • Increased time inputs for preparatory and training activities. • Increased operational inputs resulting from more intensive co-production activities. • Increased monetary expenditure by co-producing citizens. • Increased ‘psychic’ and emotional costs. Evaluating all the elements in the circular causal chain, and comparing the results to the costs imposed, would allow us to check if indeed there is an evidence-based cost-effective pathway to outcomes through co-production activities. Favourable outcome/cost or output/cost ratios are not enough—it

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is essential to demonstrate that there is a plausible pathway by which coproduction could cause the improvements (Bovaird 2012). In practice, we still have few examples of the construction and testing of pathways to outcomes for co-production activities, although some cases such as Services for Young People in Surrey County Council have provided valuable templates, allowing the risks involved in this major transformation of the service to be better understood and more carefully managed (Tisdall 2014). In many cases, these pathways to outcomes will demonstrate that the interconnections between different elements in the circular causal chain are so dense and so strong that we are dealing with a complex adaptive system, one of the challenges to the academy discussed early in this chapter. This has major consequences for evaluation, warning us that simple cause-and-effect analyses are likely to be inappropriate and that much more experimental and integrated approaches to learning will be necessary, with evaluations which are much more tentative and contextual.

Creative Research into Co-production---Action Research and Tapping Tacit Knowledge One of the ‘challenges to the academy’ highlighted earlier in this chapter was the need for creative responses to the lessons emerging from the new and innovative approaches to involving citizens in the co-production of public services and outcomes. Creative research has two quite different dimensions—doing our ‘normal’ kind of research very differently or doing very different kinds of research. It has become very evident from the chapters in this Handbook that both approaches have been tried in the different studies which are recounted here. For example, the growth in use of research co-produced with citizens (see Ramsden and colleagues in Chapter 33 and Durose and colleagues in Chapter 35) and the recent drive towards experimental research in public administration (see Van Ryzin and Kang in Chapter 33) show how social science research is already employing new methods to pursue longstanding research objectives. Creative use of existing techniques was also evidenced by Robert and colleagues in Chapter 16 in the use of EBCD (where evaluators commented that ‘the co-design ‘work’ was more creative and relational compared to usual staff-led - or externally driven—quality improvement initiatives’) and by Coaffee and colleagues in Chapter 28 in the use of novel ways to analyse data and a World Café style format (‘to provide an open and creative conversation … that surfaces collective knowledge, shares ideas and insights, and allows everyone to gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities and challenges …’). However, it is also clear that the authors of the chapters in this Handbook are frustrated by the difficulties in doing co-production research and keen to find new ways to explore its meaning, its practice and its potential.

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Two key avenues, which are distinctively separate but nevertheless interrelated, for doing rather different kinds of research into co-production emerge from some of the chapters in this Handbook—action research and the tapping of tacit knowledge. Action research is exemplified in a range of chapters, including those by Remesar, Phinney and Sandfort, Coaffee and colleagues, Ramsden and colleagues and Durose and colleagues. While several of these are about co-production of research, action research has also been central to other co-production initiatives. Indeed, it is typified by transformation processes such as the Offenbach job centre improvement programme, using the Coproduction Star, which we discuss in Chapter 2, where a range of officers of the public employment agency developed experimental labs with service users and recorded the lessons learnt along the way. As Russell comments in Chapter 9, ‘citizens are the primary inventors’, given that they are closer to the change process than anyone else and have to cope with it, while fitting it practically into their everyday lives. As Loeffler and Bovaird in Chapter 2 suggest, much more research is needed on the change management processes by which co-production can be promoted further in practice in public service organisations. Similarly, Durose and colleagues summarise the approach of participatory action research as ‘a simultaneous and collaborative process of taking action, doing research and reflecting critically on both’, or, more pithily, as a commitment to ‘learning by doing’. This approach to research is particularly important for co-production, given that co-production is dynamic and emergent, often operating in the complex knowledge domain, so that the alternative of ‘learning by thinking’ has severe limitations. As Phinney and Sandfort highlight, a key aspect of action research is its up-front intention to have practical impact—for example, in their Discover Together case study their analysis also drew attention to a set of tools and resources for helping public organisations move towards greater engagement and citizen responsiveness. Given the interest by public service organisations in moving towards more co-productive approaches, it seems likely that co-production research in the future will make more use of action research methodology. A further driver of creativity in co-production research is the role that coproduction can play in tapping and making use of tacit knowledge on the part of citizens. In his chapter, Russell suggests that this tacit knowledge is often ‘swept aside’ in the rush to use rational thought processes, based on explicit knowledge. However, access to tacit knowledge is a key benefit of coproduction, so it is surprising how little research has so far been done into how it can be accessed. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be codified in words or other explicit ways, building on the dictum of Polanyi (1967) that ‘we can know more than we can tell’. This concept has deep roots in philosophy and, more recently, in management. Indeed, Robert Pirsig (1974), in one of the most influential modern books on quality management, argues that ‘quality’

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is a phenomenon that lies beyond language and number, so that, although everyone is capable of identifying quality, it is not possible precisely to define or measure or describe it to others—later, Pirsig (1991, 64) goes on to argue: ‘Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions’. What works and what does not work depends strongly on context and on social relationships. In complex and even in complicated knowledge domains tacit knowledge may be as good as it gets, so that harnessing it becomes central to public service and public outcome improvement. Bovaird and Loeffler (2016) distinguish between ‘technical’ non-explicit knowledge and ‘social’ non-explicit knowledge held by service users and community members. They argue that the greatest challenge for professional public services is to get access to the ‘technical’ non-explicit knowledge held by service users and their communities, since this knowledge is generally only accessible by sharing in the life experience of those people, which for professionals is highly demanding of time and emotional capital. Consequently, where this ‘technical’ non-explicit knowledge on the part of citizens is high, co-production is likely to entail that power over decisions should lie more with the service users and communities, who have most direct access to this knowledge. Non-explicit ‘social relationship’ knowledge, on the other hand, is an area where exchange between service professionals and citizens (including service users) is likely to be easier, so that a fully joint approach to decision-making may be more appropriate. A key lesson is therefore that when tacit knowledge is important, learning about co-production is a joint, socially constructed activity, not simply one for linear, rational research. Being part of the doing may therefore be intrinsic to learning and helping others to learn. Finally, tacit knowledge offers a strongly positive lesson for those coproducing public services and publicly-desired outcomes—its importance suggests that, whatever the appearances, modern public administration and social policy remains an arena in which responsible, experienced people can and must exercise agency, they do not and should not simply follow regulatory rules or algorithms; they can and should use their understanding of the local world around them to improve people’s welfare, not just accept top-down analyses of ‘strategic options’; and they can and must collectively construct a better understanding of what needs to be done to achieve positive social change, rather than simply ‘implement the corporate strategy’. Research into co-production which cannot access and suggest ways to both refine and share this tacit knowledge is missing much of the point of doing research into co-production.

And Finally … This Handbook has demonstrated that the concept of co-production can be interpreted as covering many issues that are currently very important in public management and policy. Indeed, we had thought of naming this chapter: ‘Coproduction: the theory of everything?’ or even, picking up a theme from the

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chapter by Coaffee and colleagues: “Co-ubiquity”—where to start and where to end?’. However, both suggestions seemed too glib—while it may be true that there has been greater multiplication of co-words than of rigorous evidence on their effects, the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate that there has nevertheless been a slow build-up of knowledge around co-production, which has helped it to become more plausible to policy makers and practitioners as an approach, and has promoted its wider academic consideration. Moreover, the suggestions in this chapter highlight ways in which it should be possible in the next few years to deepen and extend this knowledge base about coproduction, partly by bringing to bear knowledge from a much wider range of disciplines and perspectives and partly by using co-production itself as one of the key tools for research. So perhaps, as we reach the end of this Handbook, we might speculate on why co-production has become such a major theme in the literature over recent years. We believe that it is, at least partly, because it makes us face squarely the realisation that knowledge and capabilities are often more widespread but, in some ways, more limited than has been commonly assumed over the past century. Indeed, we believe that this twin realisation is so dramatic that it is likely to have a revolutionary effect on the social sciences view of the world over the next decades. On the one hand, we have come to realise that the knowledge (both explicit and tacit) and the capabilities for everyday living possessed by most of our people are essential for the effective working of society, public services and indeed much of the market system, although they had previously been remarkably ignored by many scholars and by most politicians and by government officials responsible for public policy. The significance of these contributions by citizens through co-production is being increasingly uncovered by research and built into the practices of those on the front line of public services. Perhaps key research questions over the next decade will be why it took so long for this realisation to dawn, and how could we have wasted the capabilities of our citizens for so long by not making them an integral part of our public service systems? At the same time, we have come to realise how limited is our knowledge about and capability to intervene effectively in complex social, economic and public service systems. This has highlighted how misguided we have been to become so arrogant about the superior effectiveness of professional and ‘expert’ inputs to public services—essential and valuable though these inputs are, they could never deliver the high aspirations and the level of certainty which we increasingly came to demand from them, tackling ‘wicked problems’ in complex adaptive systems. This has opened up the gates, from another direction, to appreciation that contributions from other sources—namely, co-production by service users and communities—can be hugely valuable, albeit in different and complementary ways to the inputs from public service organisations.

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As we have observed elsewhere (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012), co-production partly harks back to some of the philosophical roots of public service as necessary to public well-being: ‘To everyone according to their needs, from everyone according to their ability’. However, it also provides a fresh perspective on the future reform of the modern welfare state by focusing on people’s social abilities and their community actions, not just on their personal capabilities and needs. This therefore also recognises the limits of the state: ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. Indeed, given its potential role in accessing tacit knowledge and underused capabilities, and helping us to cope with wicked problems, co-production could be transformative, as many authors in this Handbook have commented, and as the Covid-19 crisis has highlighted in many communities. We hope that the contributions in this Handbook will help in taking forward the demanding research agenda discussed in this chapter and so ensure these high aspirations for co-production are realised.

References Banerjee, A., & Duflo, E. (2019). Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems. London, UK: Allen Lane. Bovaird, T. (2012). Attributing outcomes to social policy interventions – ‘gold standard’ or ‘fool’s gold’ in public policy and management? Social Policy and Administration, 48(1): 1–23. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2012). From engagement to co-production: The contribution of users and communities to outcomes and public value. Voluntas, 23(4): 1119–1138. Bovaird, T., & Loeffler, E. (2016). Learning about public service co-production when real quality is that which lies beyond language and number. Paper presented at the 38th Annual Research Conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Washington, DC. Freeden, M. (2019–2020). A new ideological era. RSA Journal (4): 22–27. Garlatti, A., et al. (2018). Co-production and cost-efficiency: An awkward couple? A structured literature review. Paper presented at the International Symposium Resilience, Sustainability and Innovation in Public Services, Venice, 7th June 2018 (unpublished). Linders, D. (2012). From e-government to we-government: Defining a typology for citizen coproduction in the age of social media. Government Information Quarterly, 29(4), 446–454. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2012.06.003. Loeffler, E., & Bovaird, T. (2018). Assessing the effect of co-production on outcomes, service quality and efficiency. In Brandsen‚ T.‚ Steen‚ T. and Verschuere‚ B. (eds.), Co-production and co-creation: Engaging citizens in public service delivery. London: Routledge. Oliver, K., Kothari, A., & Mays, N. (2019). The dark side of coproduction: Do the costs outweigh the benefits for health research? Health Policy and Systems Research 17, 33. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-019-0432-3. Pirsig, R. (1974). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. London: The Bodley Head. Pirsig, R. (1991). The Metaphysics of Quality. New York: Bantam Books.

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Polanyi, M. (1967). The Tacit Dimension. New York: Doubleday. Tisdall, C. (2014). “The Transformation of Services for Young People in Surrey County Council”, Governance International Case Study. https://www.govint.org/ good-practice/case-studies/the-transformation-of-services-for-young-people-in-sur rey-county-council/.

Index

0–9 311, 431, 439–443

A Accountability, 13, 20, 25, 26, 29, 44, 121, 222, 223, 243, 269, 290, 299, 452, 453, 459, 460, 462, 473, 567, 578, 582, 584, 585, 587, 589, 596, 599, 600, 602, 603, 609, 663, 685, 706 Ombudsman, 453 Action research action learning, 374–376 collaborative action, 55, 218, 224, 475 participatory action research, 30, 676, 677, 709 Air Quality Monitoring, 432, 433 ‘Alongsider’, 180 Asset-based approaches asset-based community development (ABCD), 4, 7, 9, 11, 174, 175, 180, 187, 237 from ‘deliverables’ to ‘discoverables’, 176 ‘scarcity perspective’ or ‘abundance mind-set’?, 181 Audit, 4, 19, 20, 451–456, 458–462, 464, 702

Austerity, 24, 26, 90, 91, 136, 142, 393–395, 410, 498, 499, 589, 608, 609 and fragility of co-production programs, 609 Authority, 17, 73, 83, 84, 86, 98, 176, 181, 183, 189, 213, 217, 219–221, 223, 225, 239, 251–254, 270, 291, 294, 298, 343, 356, 366, 393, 394, 402, 453, 458, 473–475, 495, 566, 606, 699, 704 hierarchical authority, 225 managerial authority, 220

B Barriers to co-production, 52–54, 125, 143 hidden barriers, 95, 97 Behavioural insights, 95, 99, 104, 108 actual co-production behaviors v. behaviour intentions, 97, 705 biased behaviour and decisions, 97 Bias anchoring bias, 98 attribution error bias, 98, 102 confirmation bias, 98 loss-aversion bias, 102 mitigating bias, 102 Brand communities citizens as brand adaptors, 11, 161

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 E. Loeffler and T. Bovaird (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0

715

716

INDEX

citizens as brand communicators, 11, 161 citizens as brand initiators, 11, 161 Building capacity for co-production, 314, 661

C Care planning, 249, 255, 256 care and support plan, 253, 255, 258 Change management, 5, 49, 50, 56, 699, 701, 709 in Governance International Co-production Star, 49 Choice, 6, 9, 40, 44, 79–81, 92, 97, 104, 109, 119, 137, 142, 148, 159, 167, 183, 203, 231, 232, 240, 243, 250, 253, 254, 268, 463, 486, 507, 535, 542, 565, 596, 607, 615, 619, 698, 703 increased choice for service users, 703 Citizen active citizen, 195, 203, 383, 463 authentic citizen engagement, 29 citizen action, 5, 18, 28, 47–49, 55, 174, 238–240, 243, 272, 388, 391, 696 citizen as consumer, 8, 224 citizen engagement, 13, 15, 20, 211, 212, 236, 371, 378, 379, 460, 545, 548, 598–600, 609, 697 citizen engagement methods, 378 citizen-led socio-economic change, 176 citizen motivations, 4, 21, 486, 508, 510, 518 citizen reporting, 461, 464, 702 citizen space, 174, 177, 179, 180 citizen voice, 5, 18, 28, 47–49, 55, 272, 285, 387, 696 Citizenship administrative citizenship, 8, 12, 194, 200–205 in common law jurisdictions v. civil law systems, 200 Marshallian citizenship, 201 social citizenship, 201 Civic participation, 119, 338 Co-assessment

barriers to co-assessment, 459 citizen-to-citizen evaluation platforms, 463 complaints as co-assessment, 47 democratic benefits, 455 instrumental benefits, 454 relational benefits, 455 self-monitoring, 461, 702 technologically Enabled Co-Assessment Scale, 430 through digital technologies, 4, 19 ‘wheel of co-assessment’, 20, 456, 457, 459, 464, 702 Co-branding, 159 Co-commissioning, 4, 5, 13, 14, 16–18, 23, 32–34, 36, 37, 39, 45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 69, 71, 82, 85, 237, 249–254, 256, 257, 259, 265–267, 270–279, 286, 288, 289, 294, 300, 301, 305, 328, 342, 347, 349, 354, 412, 454, 480–484, 697, 699, 700 as a longitudinal process, 256 co-commissioning micro co-commissioning, 259 Co-construction, 10, 38, 47, 48, 123, 124, 126, 237, 239 Co-creation, 4, 7, 12, 17, 36–38, 40, 70, 72, 73, 88, 89, 102, 124, 126, 166, 190, 212, 242, 273, 276, 315, 326–328, 354–357, 359, 363–367, 378, 494, 528, 579, 598, 639, 699, 700, 703, 705 ‘co-creation through imagination’, 26, 578 Co-decision making, 174, 177 Co-delivery, 4, 5, 16–18, 23, 32–34, 36, 37, 39, 47, 48, 50, 55, 69, 71, 82, 85, 174, 266, 271, 272, 286, 293, 302, 313, 320, 328, 349, 354, 387–389, 391–393, 396, 397, 399–403, 412, 419, 451, 454, 480, 483, 484, 579, 697, 701 Community co-delivery, 388–391, 397 User co-delivery, 389–391 Co-design, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15–18, 21, 23, 29, 32, 34, 36–39, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 71, 72, 82, 85, 105, 124–126, 136, 174, 177, 185,

INDEX

195, 237, 266, 271, 272, 286, 294, 295, 313–315, 317–329, 336, 338–340, 342, 344, 346, 347, 349, 354, 358–360, 362–367, 371, 372, 374–379, 381–383, 387, 389, 399, 412, 451, 454, 480, 482–484, 496, 497, 499, 502, 544, 579, 623, 624, 660, 697, 699–701, 708 Accelerated Experience-Based CoDesign (AEBCD), 320, 321, 324 Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD), 16, 313, 318–328, 699, 708 quality co-design, 18, 382, 701 Co-detecting, 20, 458, 702 Co-directing, 20, 458, 702 Co-effecting, 20, 458, 702 Co-experience, 10, 38, 123, 124, 126 Co-financing, 47, 69, 195, 241, 272 Co-focussing, 20, 457, 702 Co-governance, 47, 48, 82, 196, 237, 238, 241, 566 Co-implementation, 18, 36, 47, 390–392 Co-influencing behaviour change, 18, 390, 391, 393, 394 Co-judging, 20, 458, 459, 702 Collaboration collaborative arenas, 359 partnership approach to research, 661 ‘task committees’ as collaborative arenas (Denmark), 360 Co-management, 18, 47, 48, 82, 145, 195, 196, 238, 239, 241, 338, 344, 354, 390–392, 566, 620 Commitment, 13, 20, 28, 30, 65, 84, 99, 165, 166, 191, 225, 276, 288, 294, 302, 304, 305, 314, 338, 365, 371, 373, 381, 418, 430, 494, 501, 508, 520, 530, 544, 554, 598, 601, 603, 661, 670, 672, 676, 677, 685, 686, 706, 709 Commons, 180, 191, 229 Community collaborative community networks, 596 community assets, 215, 219, 272, 392, 498

717

community building, 12, 176, 187, 190, 191 community grant-making, 291, 292, 296, 298, 299, 302 community groups, 52, 68, 291, 292, 297, 302, 304, 354, 433, 464, 493, 542, 599 community inputs, 34 community interest, 393 community justice, 599 community-led alternatives, 187 community members, 19, 26, 33, 34, 44, 45, 107, 193–195, 197, 198, 214–220, 223, 224, 390, 393, 418, 596, 601, 604, 605, 607–609, 685, 704, 705, 710 community priorities, 224 ‘deviant or deserving’?, 183 inclusive communities, 95, 181 local communities, 4, 14, 88, 182, 187, 197, 200, 202–204, 272, 274, 275, 277, 278, 325, 389, 393–396, 399, 513, 518, 529, 541, 544, 547, 548, 550, 553, 570, 596, 605, 606, 608, 609 territorial community, 202, 204 Comparative studies, 367, 652, 700 Complaints, 47, 48, 198, 326, 336, 348, 453, 460–463 Complementarity, 82, 235 Complex adaptive systems, 17, 46, 51, 476, 696, 697, 708, 711 Complex knowledge domain, 10, 46, 50, 696, 698, 709 Conflict resolution coalition formation processes, 630 co-production disputes, 529, 603 engaging with divergent stakeholder views, 619, 629 reaching compromise solutions in contested policy terrains, 617 Consultation, 20, 47, 97, 272, 275, 277, 322, 327, 337, 364, 387, 401, 451, 456, 497, 528, 530, 531, 555, 605, 654, 659, 678, 697, 703 Co-option of nonprofits by government, 233, 234 of parents by schools, 187, 387, 535

718

INDEX

Co-producers Board members, 32, 572 disadvantaged people, 547 frontline staff, 32 managers, 22, 32, 120, 698 marginalised people, 249 politicians, 32, 357 professionals, 22, 23, 32, 422, 423, 474, 477, 478, 483, 485, 486, 701, 702 ‘regular’ producers, 6, 33, 235 vulnerable people, 21 Co-production ability to co-produce, 516 additive v. substitutive co-production, 82; digitally-enabled ability, 430 ability to co-produce, 515 actual co-production behaviors v. behaviour intentions, 97, 705 and deliberation, 143 as a duty, 203 as an equal and reciprocal relationship, 36, 174, 177, 266, 349, 476 as automated behavioural change, 96, 109 as compliance, 11, 12, 120, 133, 136, 205, 517, 646 as ‘doing’ v. ‘talking’, 535 as empty signifier, 134, 140 as facilitated design process, 105 as holistic approach, 143 as informed experiments, 96, 103, 105 as motivated happening, 96, 101, 104 as public-people partnerships, 495 as resource sharing, 166 as small-scale activity, 536 authentic co-production, 173, 176, 180, 187, 190, 191, 225 causes of co-production, 639, 641, 646, 647, 649 client co-production, 81, 87–90 coerced co-production, 136 collective co-production, 6, 68, 83, 88, 91, 286, 410, 412, 422, 478, 481, 519, 701 collective co-production and group size, 6, 410

community co-production, 34, 97, 98, 109, 111, 286, 389, 403, 493, 499 compulsion to co-produce, 515 co-production causal chain, 706 co-production charter, 25 co-production definitions, 32, 40 costs of co-production, 514, 707; monetary costs, 166; psychic and emotional costs, 707 ‘dark side’ of co-production, 242, 599 decision co-production, 26, 614, 616, 617, 619, 626 demand-drive co-production, 510, 512 differing time horizons between co-producers, 122, 532 effects of co-production, 28, 197, 512, 535, 622, 639–641, 643, 646–648 evaluation of co-production, 46, 626, 707 evidence-based co-production, 4, 27, 693 generating or polarising conflict, 4, 17, 25, 26 generative mechanisms of coproduction, 157, 165, 166 Governance International Co-production Star, 49 inclusive co-production, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 108, 111 in health and healthcare, 328 inseparable from service delivery, 266 ‘inside-out’ or ‘outside-in’?, 8 in social services, 11, 400, 430 institutionalized co-production, 73, 238, 239, 241–243 institutional-level factors influencing co-production, 649, 705 instrumental or transformative?, 588 intimidating formats, 530 knowledge co-production; academic careers and knowledge coproduction, 27, 626, 627, 629, 630, 704; design principles for knowledge co-production, 51, 72, 676, 686, 706; politics in

INDEX

co-production of research, 683; shifting modes of knowledge production, 671; shifting modes of knowledge production, 671 mandatory co-production, 12, 698 mismatched expectations, 530 need for approach differentiated between groups, 22, 24, 41, 272, 279, 537, 570, 571, 573, 619, 623 negative consequences of co-production, 399, 649 non-voluntary co-production, 12, 205 origins of co-production, 61 pathways to outcomes of coproduction, 42, 54, 205, 397, 707, 708 perceived lack of added value, 530 prioritizing co-production, 225, 704 relevant expertise, 68, 97, 220, 511, 567, 670, 694 research agenda for co-production, 27, 72, 705, 712 resources for co-production, 73, 90, 512, 606 surge and decline in co-production research, 63 synergies and co-production, 414, 614 top-down or bottom-up?, 8 user co-production, 286, 389 voluntary or mandatory?, 22 willingness to co-produce, 72, 509, 510, 513, 647 Co-ubiquity, 47, 711 Covid-19, 9, 18, 26, 45, 387, 388, 390, 391, 395, 396, 403, 609, 695, 712 Creativity, 15, 16, 50, 205, 294, 314, 315, 373, 377, 495, 671, 695, 696, 709 creative procedure, 15, 339, 700 creative synergies, 672 Criminal justice, 18, 400, 410, 412–414, 416, 418, 421–423, 609 Critical pedagogy, 547 citizen science, 444, 547 critical reflection on the construction of knowledge through co-production, 672

719

Culture, 8, 18, 52, 71, 101, 102, 108, 134, 137, 149, 180, 182–185, 287, 291, 296, 302, 303, 305, 314, 325, 337, 381, 395, 410, 419, 438, 457, 463, 473, 492, 501, 555, 620, 648, 673, 703, 705 co-productive, 139, 150

D ‘Dark side’ of co-production, 242, 599 Deliberation, 11, 120, 143, 159, 165, 180, 213, 286–288, 291, 292, 295, 296, 303–305, 358, 359, 362–364, 456, 458, 474, 482, 485, 533, 619, 625, 647 Democracy citizen participation as an accepted democratic value, 381 citizens as democratic agents, 378 democratic experiments, 134, 148, 362, 696 democratic innovation, 15, 285, 287, 290, 291, 298, 303, 305, 306, 699 democratic legitimacy, 164 democratic process of knowledge production, 28, 29, 675 democratic values, 213, 586 democratisation of research process, 670 direct democracy through participatory budgeting, 288 participatory democracy, 237, 287, 290, 293, 497, 604 quality of democratic life, 18, 383 representative v. deliberative democracy, 517 Design thinking design principles for knowledge co-production, 51, 675, 676 participatory design, 16, 314 user-centred design, 314–316, 551, 585 Desistance and development of social capital, 413, 420 and helper principle, 420

720

INDEX

and identity shifts, 413, 420 and social relationships, 18, 133, 410, 413, 420 appreciative rather than corrective lens, 413 limitations, 414, 415 Digitalisation and big social science data, 629 citizen reporting, 461, 702 digital co-assessment, 702 digital co-delivery, 388, 389, 395 digital technologies, 26, 388, 389, 392, 395, 397, 534, 536, 545, 547, 577–591, 704; affordances of digital technologies, 580; instrumental, transformative and substitutive roles, 580, 582; risks of digital technologies, 704 open book government, 461, 462, 464, 702 social media, 396, 461, 515, 516, 580, 583 Direct payments, 251–253, 257 Disciplinary perspectives beyond disciplinary borders of co-production, 516 interdisciplinary research, 65, 73, 548 transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge, 547 Discover Together, 211, 215–224, 709 Diversity, 7, 97, 99, 100, 103, 107–109, 337, 340, 374, 378, 410, 513, 604, 615, 622, 661, 671, 675, 686

E Earthquakes, 431, 435, 543 Efficacy external efficacy, 511, 512 internal efficacy, 511 self-efficacy, 23, 295, 304, 318, 420, 437, 512, 517, 520, 535 Efficiency, 24, 26, 33, 36, 39, 41, 50, 57, 71, 79, 81, 92, 96, 140, 194, 213, 214, 220, 236, 266, 285, 293, 299, 355, 362, 455, 472, 507, 542, 553, 562, 566, 578, 582, 584, 586, 589, 590, 595, 706 allocative (in)efficiency, 6, 90

Electronic patient portals, 390, 395 Emergence, 84, 160, 267, 304, 337, 387, 580 emergent nature of collaborative work, 219 Emotions, 11, 100, 156, 158–160, 322, 486, 685, 698, 702 emotional labour and identity in co-produced research, 685 emotional linking to brands, 160 ‘Enabling logic’ v. ‘relieving logic’ in services, 394 Equality equal access to public services, 22, 23, 336, 508 equalities agenda, 44 equality of participants, 380 Equity, 22, 23, 71, 157, 174, 317, 434, 435, 438, 442, 443, 508, 512, 579, 603–606, 651 Ethics, 28, 30, 191, 670, 684, 685, 687 ethics in research co-production, 29, 546 limits and boundaries of confidentiality, 685 Evaluation, 15, 16, 19, 46, 51, 64, 69, 104, 108, 148, 185, 217, 218, 222, 241, 255, 271, 300–302, 305, 313, 320, 323–325, 328, 362, 372, 374, 376, 382, 394, 395, 399, 402, 412, 414, 418, 454, 460, 462–464, 476, 477, 481, 493, 494, 582, 602, 617, 618, 622, 623, 626–628, 650, 651, 661, 683, 700, 707, 708 of co-production, 46, 108, 177, 454, 494, 626, 683, 707 Evidence-based policy making, 599 evidence-based co-production, 4, 27, 693 Exclusion, 108, 289, 298, 340, 421, 439, 478, 529 social exclusion, 361, 393, 529 Experimental research, 28, 29, 640, 648, 649, 705, 708 design experiment, 373, 374 piloting research instruments, 681 Experimentation ‘democratic experimentalism’, 9, 11 in public services, 502, 596, 642–645

INDEX

Experts experts by experience, 50, 184, 393, 401 experts in their own circumstances, 29, 660 intermediating experts, 141 with lived experience, 597, 677

F Facilitation, 54, 97, 219–221, 223, 259, 296, 304, 322, 338, 340, 376, 380, 462, 481, 498 Fairness, 25, 44, 135, 297, 630, 646, 654, 704 Four Co’s, 4, 5, 23, 31, 32, 36–40, 47–50, 55, 412, 484, 703 Four sector theories, 234 Friends associations, 145 Future research agenda, 4, 27

G Gamification, 374–376, 436, 534 Governance adaptive governance strategies, 614 branding as governance strategy, 156, 157 collaborative governance, 12, 122, 165, 166, 205, 211, 215, 222–224, 273, 357–359, 566 collaborative governance capacity, 220 corporate governance, 452, 565, 567 governance at macro, meso and micro levels, 565, 566 governance dilemmas, 4, 26, 596 governance ‘pitfalls’, 157, 400, 701 governance principles, 5, 19, 25, 30, 42, 44, 45, 48, 55, 400, 694, 697, 701, 706, 707 governance strategies, 155–157, 159, 164, 167, 168 governance tools, 212 interactive governance, 357, 566, 567 of co-production, 4, 16, 22, 25, 697, 703 pluricentric forms of governance, 353 self-governing organisations, 418 Government failure, 232, 233, 242

721

H Health care health co-op, 571–573 partnership approach to health research, 661 primary health care, 29, 659, 660 Helper’s Crossroads , 177, 180 Heuristics, 7, 97, 99, 105, 292, 328, 676 heuristics and systematic errors, 97 ‘Hidden work’, 389 Housing, 95, 141, 143, 144, 215, 216, 250, 278, 294, 300, 302, 337, 340, 343, 344, 354, 360–363, 365–367, 390–392, 402, 453, 458, 479, 484, 518, 529, 648, 705 Human rights, 147, 672 Hyper-local hyper-local civic renewal, 190

I Identity work, 492, 499–501, 503 Implementation implementation gap in design and delivery of equitable resilience, 545 of co-production, 16, 493 of policy, 259 Improvement, 7, 16, 40, 91, 117, 120, 122, 266, 275, 276, 278, 318–321, 324, 325, 327, 328, 336, 341, 342, 344, 346, 347, 357, 360, 363, 382, 393, 396, 403, 429, 437, 453, 454, 458, 463, 479, 483, 484, 584, 639, 697, 699, 701, 703, 706, 708–710 improvement studies, 318, 319, 328 social improvement, 4, 15, 354 Incentives expressive or normative incentives, 508 material incentives, 508, 604 solidary incentives, 604 Inclusion inclusive nudges, 7, 108–110, 698 inclusive representation, 377, 380 Independent Living Movement, 422, 701 Inequalities economic, 290

722

INDEX

health, 286, 299, 300 political, 286, 299 social, 300, 548 Innovation acceptance of innovations, 139 disruptive innovation, 137, 182 innovation cycle, 139 innovative blueprints, 134, 145 pilot programmes, 11, 255 policy innovation, 358, 596 social innovation, 4, 7, 11, 16, 133, 134, 136–142, 144, 146–150, 340, 349, 672, 700 Inspection, 4, 19, 20, 451–456, 458–462, 464, 702 Institute of Public Care (IPC) Commissioning Cycle, 271 Integrity, 26, 322, 410, 416, 513, 582, 583, 585, 588, 590, 704 Interaction, 11, 16, 29, 34, 45, 66, 84, 87, 88, 96–98, 105, 107, 109, 120, 124, 134, 135, 137, 150, 162, 165–168, 194, 195, 197, 221, 255, 266, 271, 288, 314, 316, 323–326, 354, 359, 360, 362, 367, 379, 397, 403, 420, 473, 475, 477, 478, 494, 497, 501, 502, 514, 520, 537, 543, 545, 551, 554, 564, 566, 580, 581, 583–585, 587–589, 604, 618, 620, 624, 640, 685, 696, 698, 699 Interdependence theory, 230, 233, 234 Intergenerational, 302, 342, 395, 550 project, 302

J Joint action, 18, 27, 83, 97, 101, 103, 105, 106, 165, 166, 234, 387, 390, 391, 394–396, 605, 613, 674, 695 to improve public outcomes, 18, 391 to improve public services, 390, 394–396 Journey mapping, 327, 374, 375

L Landslides, 444, 624, 625, 630 Law civil law, 200

common law, 12, 200, 204 lawfulness, 26, 582, 583, 585, 588, 590, 591, 704 Leadership distributed leadership, 472, 474, 475 public leadership, 22, 471–474 relational leadership, 22, 23, 472, 475–481, 485, 486, 702 transformational v. transactional leaders, 472 Learning intentional learning, 372 learning by doing, 22, 23, 502, 677, 709 learning tools to enhance participation, 375 social learning theory, 419, 420 Legitimacy legitimacy of decisions, 379, 613 ‘legitimizing domination’, 684 Light structure, 476, 477, 480, 483, 485, 702 Lived experience, 124, 256, 315, 326, 390, 393, 597, 661, 677 Location of co-production going out to meet citizens, 22, 24, 534

M Mainstreaming, 134, 137, 144, 147, 148, 150, 548 social innovations, 134, 144, 147, 148 Managing co-production, 627 Marginalised people, 22, 24, 527, 703 Market failure, 213, 231 Material artifacts, 212, 221, 224 Co-Created Material Objects, 220 McDonaldisation, 88, 91 Motivation, 4, 21, 23, 24, 51, 66, 71, 105, 107, 118, 165, 166, 197, 219, 229, 420, 472, 473, 476, 477, 480, 481, 483–486, 491, 492, 499, 501–503, 508–510, 515–520, 579, 587, 685, 702, 703 citizens’ motivations, 4, 21, 486, 508, 510, 518 ease of involvement of citizens, 514 professional support, 514

INDEX

Mutual aid, 19, 412, 415, 417, 418, 602, 608

N Neighbourhood marginalised urban neighbourhoods, 544, 546, 548 neighbourhood as unit of change, 183 Network mapping, 375 New Public Governance (NPG), 10, 79, 117, 122, 123, 125, 211–214, 217, 219, 220, 224, 225, 269, 356, 565, 566, 573, 579 New Public Management (NPM), 6, 8, 10, 32, 63, 64, 66, 67, 73, 117, 119–122, 125, 212–214, 217, 218, 220, 222, 236, 267–269, 293, 355, 356, 411, 472, 473, 562, 565, 573, 579, 590, 595 New Public Service (NPS), 10, 117, 121, 122, 125, 237, 269, 396, 585 Non-profit ‘hybrid’ nature of non-profit sector, 17, 354, 366 lower legal constraints, 598 non-profit sectors defined on ownership, 17, 354 relationship between formal and informal non-profit sectors, 606, 607 value congruence problems, 600 Nudges, 44, 145, 515, 517 limitations of nudging, 110

O Obligations, 8, 12, 84, 143, 162, 194, 198, 199, 201, 204, 270, 581, 585 Open book government, 461, 462, 464, 702 Opportunistic behaviour, 24, 86, 515 Outcomes community outcomes, 3, 31, 55, 97, 273, 299, 479, 542 individual outcomes, 42, 83 of participatory budgeting, 299

723

pathways to outcomes of coproduction, 42, 54, 397, 708 quality-of-life outcomes arising from co-production, 42–45, 694, 697, 706 Overdemand on people’s time, 530

P Participation ‘choice’, ‘voice’ and ‘representation’, 562 civic participation, 97, 119, 338 deep participation, 372, 374 diversity in participation, 604 non-participation, 519, 520, 608 participatory democracy, 237, 287, 290, 293, 497, 604 participatory public governance, 561 Participatory budgeting (PB) allocating public budgets, 287, 288 as a radical political strategy, 290 depolitisation, 304 facilitative leadership, 304 funding, 13, 299, 305 global diffusion, 300 institutional fit, 298 legitimacy challenges, 305 making collective decisions, 15, 285, 287 multilevel PB, 294, 299; democratic goods, 299, 305 pitfalls, 302, 303 political challenges, 304 political PB, 285, 287, 290, 292, 295, 301, 699 sustainability challenges, 305 technocratic PB, 293 Participatory research participatory action research (PAR), 30, 676, 677, 709 participatory multi-criteria analysis, 617 participatory scenario based approaches, 617, 618, 625 Path dependency, 460 Pathways

724

INDEX

to outcomes, 42, 54, 397, 398, 400–402, 707, 708 to public value, 42 Peer ‘offender peer interventions’, 416 peer group, 43, 402 peer mentor, 10, 19, 44, 415–417 peer support, 18, 19, 21, 47, 54, 55, 259, 389–391, 393, 402, 410, 414–419, 421, 422, 701; benefits, 393, 419 Performance management, 86, 214, 225, 268, 452, 472, 501, 602, 704 performance contracting, 598, 601 Personalisation personal budgets, 14 personal health budgets, 250, 251, 254, 255, 259 personalised packages of services, 140 user control over personal budgets, 14, 256, 259 Personnel, 23, 65, 491–495, 497–502, 702 Philanthropy philanthropic amateurism, 232, 242 philanthropic failure, 243 philanthropic particularism, 232, 242 philanthropic paternalism, 232, 233, 242 Place-based approaches, 146 place-based learning, 267 Platforms for interaction, 359 platforms for collaborative governance, 359 Policy, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 17, 19, 24, 29, 46, 48, 51, 55, 65, 69, 72, 79, 90, 95, 101, 105, 108–111, 117, 118, 134–137, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148–150, 155–160, 163, 165, 167, 183, 190, 193, 195, 205, 212, 213, 224, 231, 233, 234, 240, 243, 249–251, 259, 267, 269, 271, 272, 274, 276, 286, 287, 289, 294, 296, 297, 299, 301, 303, 305, 318, 336, 346, 357–363, 366, 367, 374, 376, 381, 391, 392, 398, 403, 409, 412, 414, 415, 431, 438, 451, 452, 454, 461, 463, 515, 517, 519, 528, 532, 535, 542, 544, 545, 548, 551–553,

555, 566, 567, 572, 579, 581, 585, 599, 601, 602, 604, 609, 622, 623, 625, 626, 639, 640, 642–644, 646, 648–655, 661, 670, 676, 693, 694, 698, 701, 703, 705, 710, 711 evidence-based policy making, 599 Politicians, 9, 16, 17, 21, 32, 36–39, 41, 45, 82, 85, 99, 103, 105, 139, 156, 160, 165, 205, 274, 287–289, 298, 299, 303, 305, 337, 338, 357, 358, 360, 362, 364–367, 381, 382, 387, 476, 479–482, 498, 520, 605, 677, 699, 701, 707, 711 politicians as ‘elected kings’, 358 role in co-production, 164, 510, 520 Politics political astuteness, 14, 279, 700 political leadership, 17, 357, 360, 365, 366 politics in co-production of research, 683 role of politics in co-design, 9, 381 Populism, 356 antidote to rise of right-wing populism, 356 Power negotiated power, 484 power analysis, 177 power asymmetry, 98, 190 power dynamics, 21, 30, 478, 615, 616, 619, 620, 622, 627, 630, 675, 676, 704 power imbalance, 119, 123, 125, 176, 380, 382, 622, 623 Preferences human preference for tribalism, 98 provider preferences, 232, 233 service user preferences, 272, 697 Prevention, 388, 397, 399, 400, 444, 598, 654 Principal/agent relationships, 85, 87, 89, 472 Priorities, 28, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 56, 145, 197, 198, 214, 224, 269, 271–273, 277, 278, 286, 288, 291, 292, 294–296, 298, 302, 320, 324, 337, 338, 375, 417, 459, 479, 481, 483, 542, 598, 601, 602, 604, 622,

INDEX

623, 625, 626, 661, 662, 684, 694, 699, 707 co-prioritisation of outcomes frameworks, 272 setting priorities in co-commissioning, 271, 294, 375 Professionalism professional boundaries, 473, 492, 499, 500 professional identity work, 500 Professionalisation at Board level of non-profits, 600 public funding favouring professional over citizen inputs, 388, 562, 596, 597, 599, 601, 606, 609 proper governance, 583 Proximity, 181, 194, 196–198, 204, 205, 239, 698 proximate non-beneficiary, 197 Public branding, 167 Public choice, 79, 81, 119, 486 Public goods, 6, 25, 29, 34, 73, 81, 90, 146, 157, 231, 236, 267, 299, 353, 355, 480, 483, 563, 648, 649, 705 Public governance command and control model, 566, 573 democratic, multi-stakeholder model, 567, 569 participatory governance, 237, 288, 289, 292, 298–300, 303, 304, 371, 382, 566 performing governance, 26, 582, 584, 586, 589, 590 proper governance, 26, 582–586, 588–591 responsive governance, 212, 286, 581, 582, 584–587, 589–591 stewardship model, 567, 569 Public participation, 16, 285, 338, 349, 377, 387, 434, 459, 460, 562, 626, 643, 649, 650, 652–655 Public procurement, 270 Public service demand and control, 12, 82, 353, 562, 573 public service delivery, 10, 48, 63, 68, 69, 72, 118, 120, 122–126, 133,

725

234, 236, 238–240, 243, 493, 579, 584, 590, 617, 649, 651 public service logic (PSL), 10, 38, 88, 118, 123 public service reform, 8, 10, 15, 16, 117, 119, 122, 125, 126, 293, 327, 595, 596; administrative reform, 267, 268, 288; Institutional reform, 176, 188, 305; organisational reform, 190 Public space, 4, 15, 215, 274, 302, 335–340, 342–349, 380, 481, 493, 494, 543, 584, 698, 700 Public value(s) Governance International Public Value Model, 42, 43 perceived lack of added value from co-production, 530 performing governance, 582, 584 proper governance, 26, 581, 582, 584, 585, 590, 591 responsive governance, 581, 582, 585, 587, 590, 591 value-sensitive design, 586, 591 Q Quality of co-production quality co-design, 18, 382, 701 quality of democratic life, 18, 383 quality process design and facilitation, 378, 380 R Rapid-cycle feedback, 217 Rational thinking, 17, 97 plural rationality based approaches, 27, 615, 617, 624 Reciprocity, 6, 44, 84, 85, 105, 195, 266, 509, 517, 567 reciprocal relationships, 21, 22, 36, 174, 177, 195, 266, 349, 412, 472, 476 Reflexive practice, 374, 375, 626 Rehabilitation, 324, 388, 390, 392, 397–399, 402, 412, 413, 415, 417 Research design and methods action research, 29, 30, 314, 660, 664, 677, 694, 709

726

INDEX

behavioral public administration, 644, 655; actual co-production behaviors v. behaviour intentions, 97, 705 citizen-generated data into decision-making processes, 544 co-produced research, 24, 28–30, 552–555, 662, 665, 686, 699, 705, 706; values embedded in co-produced research, 124 creative methods, 30, 534 deliberative methods, 30, 677 dialogic approach, 546; community engagement through data circulation, 550; integration and curation of data for decision support, 550; making data flows visible, 549; transformations towards waterproofing data, 551; translation of waterproof data into sustainable flood risk governance, 551 experimental research, 28, 29, 640, 648, 649, 705, 708; quasi- or natural experiments, 645, 646; randomised experiment, 640–643; randomised experiment, lab, field or survey, 641 mixed methods in research, 29, 305, 380, 545, 619, 661–663, 705 participatory action research, 30, 677, 709 participatory research, 29, 547, 660, 664, 675, 677; participatory mapping of risk perception, 544 review of experimental research on co-production, 29, 640, 648, 649, 705 visual methods, 30, 677 Resilience as a multiplicity of related, and often-experimental practices, 543 as safer development, 543 community resilience, 544, 546 complex dynamics of risk, resilience and development, 545 critical resilience studies, 542 localised networked responses, 542

provider resilience, 45 service user resilience, 44 Responsibilities, 22, 49, 84, 119, 143, 150, 253, 304, 355, 462, 499, 507, 509, 520, 542, 571–574, 577, 590, 606, 608, 685, 704, 705 Rights human rights, 147, 672 personal rights, 10, 134 right to participation, 16, 336 right to the conversion of the marginal city into the city of citizenship, 336 social rights, 147, 200, 201, 267 Risk disaster risk reduction, 544, 547, 549 professional risk aversion, 253 risk appetite in a political and bureaucratic context, 381 Rules, 29, 37, 68, 80, 118, 136, 144, 146, 156, 167, 186, 187, 274, 303, 338, 359, 362, 365, 422, 481, 484, 485, 533, 598, 600–602, 604, 614, 615, 620, 648, 685, 705, 710 governance rules, 156 process rules, 167

S Salience of co-production, 510 Scaling of co-production, 4, 21, 52 Scrutiny, 4, 13, 19, 20, 148, 240, 241, 289, 291, 296, 303, 305, 451–462, 464, 555, 670, 702 Selection bias, 23, 511, 512 Self-care, 391, 396, 399, 401, 499 Self-efficacy, 23, 295, 304, 318, 420, 437, 512, 517, 520, 535 Self help, 19, 144, 145, 417, 607, 608 self-help groups, 19, 144, 145, 417, 607, 608 Self-interest, 83, 84, 105, 109, 286, 508, 509 Self-monitoring, 461, 463, 464, 702 Self-organising, 238, 388, 389, 464, 591 self-governing organisations, 418 Service cycle, 6, 68–71, 73, 121, 266, 480

INDEX

Service delivery, 6, 10, 11, 22, 23, 25, 33, 36, 48, 62–64, 67–69, 72, 117, 118, 120, 122–126, 133, 191, 195, 204, 212, 214, 233–236, 238–241, 243, 255, 277, 293, 296, 316, 323, 357, 410, 417, 473, 493, 494, 507, 508, 512, 514, 515, 533, 563, 567, 579, 584, 587, 590, 596, 598, 599, 617, 649, 651 Service design, 16, 47, 123, 140, 149, 271, 296, 315–317, 320, 327, 356, 371, 372, 374–376, 383, 412, 473 ‘Serviceland’, 177, 178 Service quality, 11, 13, 25, 26, 135, 194, 275, 429, 562–564, 568–570, 573, 574, 706 Service users apathy, 460 service user inputs, 706 service user priorities, 4, 8, 45, 271, 707 vulnerable and dependent service users, 89, 703 Skills for co-production communication skills, 492, 495–497 enabling skills, 21, 492, 498, 499, 501, 502 segmenting skills, 492, 493 skills of citizens, 533 skills of managers, 360, 460 skills of politicians, 21 skills of staff, 21 Smart home, 135, 396 Social capital, 20, 23, 71, 105, 173, 220, 413, 420, 455, 513, 517, 518, 544, 552, 596, 604, 706 Social cooperatives, 19, 415, 417, 418 Social Impact Bond, 271, 598 Social justice, 15, 293, 299–303, 305, 413, 543, 545, 552, 672 Social learning theory, 419, 420 Social order, 173, 174, 176–178, 180, 190, 191, 672 Social policy, 7, 275, 529 Social prescribing, 392 Social protection, 142, 191 Social services, 10, 11, 133, 134, 136, 138, 140, 144, 267, 301, 366, 400,

727

430, 453, 493, 496, 500, 561, 564, 569, 570, 602, 659 Social vulnerability, 529, 533 Socio-economic environment, 146 Strategic commissioning, 265, 269, 271, 273, 275 Strategic management, 14, 265–268, 273, 274, 277, 279, 412 strategic learning, 277 strategic planning, 273, 274, 276, 277, 279, 337, 354, 356, 531, 700 Strategies for co-production, 11 Subsidiarity principle, 176, 180, 198 horizontal subsidiarity, 203 Sustainability, 25, 26, 44, 139, 297, 302, 305, 323, 338, 552, 562, 596, 606, 607, 609, 615, 617, 652, 671, 683 Synergy, 165, 661 Systematic review, 70, 372, 377–379, 381, 421, 473, 661

T Tacit knowledge, 30, 87, 183, 585, 694, 696, 709, 710, 712 Team production theory, 85, 86 TERRAPINS heuristic, 29, 676 Third sector, 4, 7, 13, 23, 42, 45, 48, 52, 69, 122, 229–234, 237, 239, 243, 288, 293, 295, 297, 298, 387, 482, 492, 568 third sector priorities, 42 third sector theory as ‘incomplete’, 234 Three lens theory, 233 Transformation co-production as a transforming paradigm, 411 transformation design, 326–328 transformation potential, 40 transformative change, 10, 22, 24, 40, 125, 553 transforming Services for Young people in Surrey County Council, 275 Translators, 213, 220, 223 external, 220, 223

728

INDEX

internal, 213, 223, 224 Transparency, 25, 29, 44, 202, 289, 290, 299–301, 303, 340, 462, 582, 584, 598, 602, 603, 663 Treatment, 18, 28, 44, 68, 70, 79, 80, 88, 205, 237, 250, 318, 322, 388, 397, 398, 400, 401, 413, 459, 499, 502, 535, 536, 599, 602, 603, 640–642, 646, 649 Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, 29, 660 Trust in citizens by public services, 20, 23, 72, 120, 121, 277, 293, 379, 395, 455, 517, 647 in government by citizens, 356, 358, 455, 512, 513, 517 U UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, 250 Universal Declaration of Emerging Human Rights, 16, 335, 336 Urban design, 16, 335–337, 339, 349 Urban governance co-design, 335, 338, 349, 518 User-centred service processes, 495 User-led communities, 19, 418, 419 User-led organisations, 418, 419 V Value creation, 4, 10, 21, 44–46, 88, 118, 121, 123, 126, 355, 397, 581

Voluntary sector, 69, 229, 230, 232, 234–238, 243, 387, 389, 482, 578 supplementary role, 238 voluntary failure, 232, 242 Volunteer volunteering, 178, 204, 302, 388, 389, 402, 421, 479, 482, 483, 486, 494, 495, 500, 509, 516, 517, 530 Voting, 137, 178, 198, 291, 292, 295–298, 418, 537, 566 voting in participatory budgeting, 4, 13–15, 47, 237, 272, 273, 285, 534, 605 Vulnerable people definition of vulnerability, 529 marginalised neighbourhoods, 544, 548 pro-poor policymaking, 548

W ‘What works’ in co-production, 374, 484 ‘Wheel of co-assessment’, 20, 456, 457, 459, 464, 702 Wicked problems, 9, 27, 29, 314, 614, 711, 712 Work environment staff autonomy, 573 staff control over daily work-life tasks, 568 work satisfaction, 25, 563, 568, 569, 573